What is the secret of the happy conjunction between Pascal Comelade and Enric Casasses? Perhaps this rising without leaving the feet on the ground, going from the grand piano to the toy instruments, from Verdaguer and Orfeo to the tortilla and the aversion to the police, with that execution, interpretation and diction, apparently fragile, that be about to break and fall to stumble and walk.
His recital yesterday at the Poesia i, in front of the sea, in the twilight of Caldes d’Estrac, a step away from the Palau Foundation – from where the festival, directed by Eduard Escoffet, has been radiating through the Maresme – was the occasion to listen to them again, despite the theoretical withdrawal from the stages that the musician from Roussillon had started in 2019, and which fortunately broke.
With more intense spaces with verses and other more instrumental ones, the night advanced with the strophic and thematic variety of the poet, warning that “només tens l’ànima il legal”. Just in case.
Among the audience, which filled the space of the Can Muntanyà park, the director of the Institut Ramon Llull, Pere Almeda –he had directed the Palau Foundation–, Perejaume, the fashion designer Josep Abril, the poets Gerard Altaió and Miriam Reyes, Manel Guerrero , the singer-songwriter Ivette Nadal, the editor Jordi Cornudella, the translator Arnau Barios …
He also had a memory for Sebastià Roure, with his Europe change bad, which tells us that “music viu dins meu”. And we feel it inside. I Casasses takes the triangle – “the John Coltrane of the triangle”, Comelade had once defined it. And he recites Verdaguer’s Plus Ultra, and when he recites that “la immensitat és oberta” he sees the sea and the viewer can turn around to see how it opens endlessly.
Orpheus’ advice arrives and the audience’s smile lights up, while Comelade’s piano, precise and sweet, builds with Iván Telefunken, Oriol Luna and Roger Fortea, with percussion and toy instruments and not – now a distorted guitar , now a watering can, almost always the electric bass, the drums, now some trumpets …–, and among his poems are also Guillem Viladot, Josep Sebastià Pons and a route by car, and the Untitled Cançó by Pau Riba, playful , and so on until the first and second encores of his Sextina (“Give me air …”) and America “is the people next door”, since “peoples are mixed for love”, when the piano attacks a point of blues, because in the end, later, “we light fires to scare the fear”, but it’s done at night and “everything falls, but the fire goes up”. And poetry, and music, and more.
Catalan version, here
