The Barcelona duo Tarta Relena has participated in the Tiny Desk, the series of concerts organized by the NPR Music radio program All Songs Considered, through their folk and Gregorian chant in Catalan. A twenty-minute performance that took place on April 3 can currently be seen on YouTube.
In it, Marta Torrella and Helena Ros sing some of their songs on a stage made up of a work table surrounded by shelves full of objects. The duet has thus left its folkloric and Catalan mark in a space of global prestige that has seen the performance of artists such as Justin Timberlake, Olivia Rodrigo or C. Tangana.
However, it is not the first time that we have heard Catalan music in this space, since in 2019 the Reus singer Lau Noah performed the song L’adéu in this language. Felix Contreras, host of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts, explains that seeing the duet for the first time “was a reminder that the human voice must be humanity’s oldest musical instrument.”
In total, Torrella and Ros sang five songs in five different languages. El suïcidi i el cant (Catalan), Me yelassan (Greek), Tota pulchra (Latin), Sappho (classical Greek) and Las alamedas (Spanish). The Catalan duo’s goal was to “evoke images of lyricists and vocalists from past centuries.”
Tarta Relena was born in 2016 by Marta Torrella and Helena Ros. These two singers explore different styles of vocal music a cappella. Always, with the geographical area of ??the Mediterranean as a reference context.
The repertoire they sing ranges from traditional music to author’s music, with experimentation as a flag and the combination of vocal techniques as a creative engine. In the arrangements of Tarta Relena, the timbres of Torrella and Ros’ voices coexist with the synthetic sound of electronic instruments and samples.
