The jury of the National Current Music Award 2022, granted by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, has proposed awarding this award to the Catalan singer and artist Sílvia Pérez Cruz.
The jury has awarded him this recognition for “the creative and interpretative quality of his career”, as well as “for the naturalness, versatility and audacity of his proposals”. The jury has also highlighted “his unwavering commitment to beauty.”
In the closest previous editions, the winners were Rozalén (2021), Chano Domínguez (2020), María Rodríguez ‘Mala Rodríguez’ (2019) or Christina Rosenvinge (2018).
The winner is a very prolific and versatile artist within the Catalan and Spanish cultural scene. She was born in Palafrugell in 1983, she has a degree in jazz singing from ESMUC, although her musical training began when she was 4 years old, when she began to study in a wide range of subjects.
Her launch pad at a popularly visible level was as co-founder and singer of the group Las Migas (2004 – 2010), then she would intermittently collaborate with guitarist Toti Soler, and finally she made the leap to a more ambitious stage with the albums 11 de novembre and Granada, this one in a duet with Raül Fernández Refree.
His musical career -with the fruitful influence of his parents Glòria Cruz and Càstor Pérez- has so far been characterized by curiosity, open-mindedness and colours, authenticity and high quality standards.
After working with a string quintet for a few years, he formed a duo with the Menorcan pianist Marco Mezquida, which ended with an anthological live album recorded at the Blue Note in Tokyo.
His current musical discourse has been linked to the Farsa project for a couple of years, where he reflects and turns his collaboration with other musicians and other arts, such as theater, cinema, dance, painting, photography or poetry, and which has materialized in the album Farce (impossible genre).
It is precisely in some of these other artistic spheres that Pérez Cruz’s professional career has expanded in parallel. In theater she has worked alongside Joan Ollé, Julio Manrique or Lluís Homar, or in dance, alongside Rocío Molina in the memorable Grito pelao.
Although it is in the cinema where his recognition has been most spectacular in this parallel career, so to speak, already giving voice to the multi-award-winning film Blancanieves, by Pablo Berger, or recording the soundtrack for Cerca de tu casa, by Eduard Cortés, a film iconic and very emotional about evictions, where he also participates with a role.
The jury, chaired by Joan Francesc Marco, general director of the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music, includes Tomás Fernando Flores, director of Radio 3; Almudena Heredero, director of Primavera Sound Madrid; Jordi Herreruela, director of the Cruïlla festival; Paula Quintana, director and director of the Radio 3 Captain Demo program; the musician Javier Ruibal and Carmen Zapata Corbalán, president of the Association of Women in the Music Industry (MIM).
