Carla Aliño | Valencia (EFE).- Lucía Veintimilla has been playing the violin since she was 4 years old and now, almost three decades later and after having performed in some of the main venues and auditoriums in Europe and Asia, she returns to her Valencian origins to publish her first album, a job in which he has invested “all his being”.
This was stated to EFE in an interview on the occasion of the launch of “Origins, works for solo violin”, published by the Asturian label ARIA classic, in which the Valencian artist interprets works by prominent composers such as Dario Marianelli, Jorge Muñiz, Francisco Coll and Eugène Ysaÿe.
Both the Asturian composer Jorge Muñiz, whose music is performed in Europe, Asia, America and Oceania by renowned ensembles, and the Italian Dario Marianelli, winner of an Oscar, a Golden Globe and several nominations for best soundtrack, have created works for her and have dedicated them to her.
A risk with a happy ending
The work of the Valencian Francisco Coll, one of the composers with the most international projection, had never been recorded before, while that of the Belgian Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931), considered “the king of the violin”, is the second time it has been recorded. .
Veintimilla’s work contains great courage, since facing his first album with works for solo violin, without any other musical accompaniment, has been “a complete risk”, especially since, in addition, they are new works, some of which are not they were finished within a week of starting recording.
“I didn’t know if it was going to turn out well but the only thing I could do was go all out and do what I usually do, which is to give everything I have to each project,” says this young musician from Alcublas (Valencia), raised in Asturias and accustomed to working with great discipline since she was very little.
The effort has been worth it. Veintimilla is “proud and happy” with the result and the project is having a lot of repercussions, as well as being applauded by the composers of the works she performs, according to her assurances.
The origin of the disc
Veintimilla left London, where she had lived since she went to study music at the age of 19, during the pandemic, since artistic activity came to a complete halt there, while in Spain she maintained herself and she obtained various jobs, especially to give solo violin recitals.
“When I wanted to realize it, there was no point in going back because my activity had exploded here,” she explains, adding that, in addition, she had always had the dream of being able to live in Valencia, a place she associates with the summers of her childhood surrounded by grandparents, uncles and cousins, and from whom he never wanted to leave.
At that moment the idea of making the record occurred to him, since in those months he had devoted himself to the solo violin repertoire and there came a time when he ran out of options, since the repertoire is not as wide as can be the quartets or trios.
Thus, it occurred to him to commission solo violin works from composers he appreciated and who have been important in his life, while representing those regions that have been key to his development, both musical and personal, such as Asturias, Valencia or London.
important composers
The first one she went to was Dario Marianelli, whom she met in London as a babysitter for her daughter and who became a “refuge and family” for her in the years she spent in that city. The composer accepted immediately and in a couple of months he wrote for her “an entire suite, in the style of Bach”.
Jorge Muñiz also created an original work for her, “Salve Regina”, while he proposed to Francisco Coll, whom he had met in London, to interpret his Hyperludes, a project that the Valencian had started as a music student in 2006, but which He didn’t start writing until 2013 and it hadn’t been recorded.
“Here, the challenge was for me”, says Veintimilla, referring to the difficulty of the Hyperludes, some pieces in which you can hear everything from allusions to Renaissance choirs or evocations of cante jondo, to rock rhythmic patterns and broken melodies.
The “Sonate posthume pour violon seul, opus 27 bis” by Eugène Ysaÿe is a sonata that the author dedicated to the Galician violinist Manuel Quiroga, which was discovered, completed and recorded by the French violinist Philippe Graffin in Brussels in 2018.
The one on the “Origins” album is the second recording of this piece; For the artist, it has been “an opportunity to help make this sonata known and to make it part of the repertoire”, since, as she points out, the Bach and Ysaÿe sonatas are considered the cornerstone of the instrument.
Future projects
After this project, in which the artist has recapitulated what her existence has been up to this day musically speaking and whose process has been “really hard”, Veintimilla does not rest and is already working or devising new plans.
Among them, recitals in Madrid or Asturias to promote the album; the collaboration with a composer who wants him to premiere his works at various festivals, or his participation in two documentaries about the cartoonist Paco Roca and the writer Alejandro Palomas.
In addition, he adds, he is trying to set up a chamber music festival in the Valencian Community and has already begun to think about what his next album will be because, according to what he says, once he has opened “Pandora’s box” he can no longer stop.
Lucía Veintimilla, who considers music to be something as “vocational” as medicine or religion, encourages the love of classical music in boys and girls and ignites the flame of curiosity, since they are “the public of the future”. and performers and composers need them to keep creating. EFE
