Barcelona will have a new festival this summer, Alma-Festival Jardins Pedralbes, thanks to Concert Studio, the promoter for the last decade of the Jardins de Pedralbes Festival. The new musical proposal will take place at Poble Espanyol from July 10 to 27, with a list of artists to be announced next Tuesday. Bearing in mind that during those same dates another festival is planned to be held in the gardens of the Pedralbes palace, organized by the promoter Clipper’s Live, two festivals that could be called very similar will co-exist, in the same city and at the same time
It was Martín Pérez, director of Concert Studio, who announced the creation of the Alma festival this Friday through a video published on social networks and recorded precisely in the gardens of Pedralbes in which he thanks the attendees of the festival “for these ten years that have been so important in our lives”.
“We will do everything possible to make it as similar to what people have found in Pedralbes and liked”, explains Martín Pérez, and recalls that throughout the ten editions in which they have been at the helm of the festival de la Diagonal have had more than 500,000 attendees. “We continue to be us, we have a lot of public who will need to be told where we are so that they don’t think that we have disappeared, or that we are the ones who are still there”, says the director of the promoter, referring to the new festival that will be held in the gardens of Pedralbes “If we don’t have the place, we take our way of doing the festival elsewhere.”
It is with this intention that the new festival is presented as the eleventh edition of those that have been held in Diagonal, and also incorporates the surname Festival Jardins Pedralbes, a trademark that Concert Studio has registered. “The Alma-Jardins Pedralbes Festival will be the 11th edition of the festival”, explains the organization in a statement, recalling that it has been “recognised in Europe for its great successes and has brought together great artists since its first edition in 2013” . The name Ànima corresponds to this desire to bring the spirit with which the promoter has worked for the past decade to the festival.
The concerts at the Poble Espanyol will have a capacity of 5,000 people, significantly higher than the capacity of the Pedralbes gardens. This figure includes 500 established and numbered seats that will be achieved thanks to the installation of two tribunes with the intention of facilitating the attendance of a certain type of public that values ??comfort more. The creation of a restaurant area, identical to the one at the original Pedralbes festival, is also planned.
The agreement with the Montjuïc venue, a private entity, is still pending the last fringes, and the duration of the festival could one day be extended. In any case, the intention is to close a multi-year contract, with the intention of consolidating the new date in the summer festival calendar of the Ciutat Comtal.
The organization of the Ànima festival has not yet given any names of the artists who will perform in this edition, although it has detailed that they will include all kinds of musical genres, from rock and folk or pop to electronica. “This year we can’t present 35 first-line concerts, we will present 14 or 15”, explains Martín Pérez, without ruling out that the figure could be extended from now until Tuesday, always with “important names”.
Throughout its last ten editions, the Jardins de Pedralbes Festival has hosted performances by artists such as Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Mariah Carey, Lana del Rey, Tom Jones or Simple Minds, among many others.
The planning of the festival began after the final scores of the public competition held for the concession of the music festival in the gardens of the palace of Pedralbes, with a duration covering the next three years, were known. “We won a competition and lost the auction”, regrets the director of Concert Studio, and recalls that his company was the one that obtained the best score in the artistic sections subject to assessment, such as the presence of Catalan artists, representation feminine and variety. “I didn’t think that a festival was decided by who puts in the most money.” Concert Studio was ranked fourth in the competition, with the lowest score: 40.61 points in the technical offer and 27.75 points in the economic one, in which it offered 555,000 euros.
The winner, Clipper’s Live, obtained 31.76 points in the technical offer and the highest score (50 points) in the economic offer, since the offer reached one million euros, which meant a total of 81.76 points. The competition was a source of controversy because it was the first time that the Pedralbes festival was publicly tendered, contrary to the opinion of Concert Studio, which alleged the existence of a prior agreement for the celebration of the event
“As a group we have to overcome a loss of this type. When you have a new project, instead of regretting it, you have to see how you can do it better”, explains Martín Pérez, and emphasizes that it was his son Martín’s initiative to locate the festival in Poble Espanyol after avoiding the difficulties that it involved making it fit into the venue’s programming. A success that represented “a big green shoot for us, because it meant having a place to do it”.
With the discovery next Tuesday of the artists who will participate in the Alma-Festival Jardins Pedralbes, interest grows even more to know the plans of Clipper’s Live, directed by Juli Guiu, for the “other” festival in Pedralbes, with which will coincide in dates during the month of July if the calendar of last year’s edition is repeated.
