After 32 years of dedicating himself to music, but especially to the music of others, Borja Penalba (Valencia, 1975) makes his debut with a solo album, Giròvag (Blau-Discmedi) and a presentation concert at Barnasants, this Thursday at Parallel 62 (9 p.m.). After having played with musicians such as Lluís Llach, Maria del Mar Bonet (with whom he signed a half-finished album and still has pending performances), Feliu Ventura, Miquel Gil, Mireia Vives – with whom he also shared Ovidi 4, with David Fernàndez and David Caño and in recent times Toti Soler – or Obrint Pas, has been added – he does not jump into the void, because “I am already old and I have lived twenty lives, or thirty, or forty, and I have been going through screens”, like him explains himself.
“Some time ago they started telling me that I should do something alone, but I couldn’t find the time or the motivation in the different vital moments I’ve lived”, he says to introduce Giròvag, which for him is more than an album “giving the ‘last step, to defend a project and get rid of the anxiety of being able to show all the faces of that polyhedron that we all are’. After always being “an accompanist or behind an instrument, now I can play the clown, move, open my eyes, because I always play with my eyes closed”. For the Valencian musician, it’s not just an album: “It’s the beginning of my last project, my vital project, until I get tired or until I kick it”.
For the concert, Penalba wanted to make a big deployment, as he already did in December at the Teatre Principal in Valencia, and he will be accompanied on stage by twelve musicians: in addition to drums (Josep Bas), bass/double bass (Ales Cesarini) and piano and keyboards (Vicent Colonques) there will be trios of choristers (Tere Núñez, also on minor percussion, Josep Maria Zapater who will also add guitars and Noèlia Pérez), strings (Ana Requena and Miguel Ángel López on violin and Yolanda Bueso on cello) and wind instruments (Eva Garín on trombone, Maria Puertas on helicó and Paula Carrillo on tenor sax). “It will be a mascletà, and I’m from Carmen and if we know anything it’s about that”.
“For me it was essential to present it to the Principality as part of the Barnasants, because it has been the greatest ally of the original song of the Catalan Countries for 29 years”, assures the singer-songwriter, and the director of the festival, Pere Camps , insists that it will be an exceptional concert, which “has been possible due to the sum of effort and complicity, while his manager, Yanni Munujos, assures that “it is not just about militancy, but about believing in the song concept”.
The disc includes sixteen cuts between which you go from the solitude of the guitar and voice to the reminiscence of the cabaret, with short and tender pieces like Sam, dedicated to a daughter, which barely lasts a minute, or the narrative Et in Arcàdia Ego, who in more than seven minutes tells a story that was told to him and that is related to a deceased authority of his city, which he does not explain but that he hopes that when the song is heard, heads will be tied. There is also space for the musicalization of poems by authors such as Ventura Ametller, Marià Villangómez, Joan Fuster, Bertolt Brecht or Joanjo García, in addition to the collaboration of Roc Casagran and the tribute to a poet friend who was the spark of the album, Manel Marí: “The first idea was to set his book Tavernàries (Bromera, 2016) to music, but I realized that it would be too nocturnal and I wanted a first album to have more light, but I did want was present”. “Some songs are 10 years old, others 5, others are like a minute and a half long, and the others – he composed forty of them – I will be removing them over time”.
Penalba says that in music “I’ve never looked for anything, it’s been like this, it’s been accident after accident, a permanent serendipity”, because “I didn’t even want to be a musician”, but now he will be able to convey “my own vision of the world, but also denounce and laugh, with a vocation of service to find usefulness in what I do”. As he sings in ‘Viu’: “I was born, I lived… and it’s worth it”.
