Carla Aliño|València (EFE).- The pianist Josu de Solaun and the Capella de Ministrers ensemble, both from Valencia, are the only Spaniards to win the 2023 International Classical Music Awards (ICMA), which is an incentive for them to continue working and a huge opportunity for both projection and promotion.
This was stated to EFE by De Solaun and Carles Magraner -director of the veteran and multi-award-winning group specialized in early music- before participating this Friday in the gala for the delivery of these awards, considered the Grammys of classical music, which will take place at the Forum Nacional de Música de Wroclaw (Poland), and that next year will host the Palau de la Música in Valencia.
De Solaun has won in the Solo Instrument category with the album “De Solaun Haydn Piano Sonatas”, published by IBS Classical, while Capella de Ministrers has won in the Early Music category with “El collar de la paloma”, a work around the homonymous book by the Cordovan humanist Ibn Hazm written 1,000 years ago in Xàtiva.
Both will perform at the award ceremony, along with the rest of the winners in the sixteen categories included in the ICMA 2023 and the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic directed by Giancarlo Guerrero.
The concert will be broadcast to the whole world through Polish Radio, Program 2 and the YouTube channel of the German public channel Deutsche Welle, which reached more than 700,000 views in the previous edition.
An incentive to continue working
In statements to EFE, Josu de Solaun (València, 1981) assures that winning this prestigious award is “a kind of voice” that gives him encouragement and is “an incentive to continue” an artistic work that, according to what he says, “is always subject to to the doubt”.
“I compare it to when you are running a marathon and someone anonymous brings you some water and encourages you to continue,” says this pianist, who points out that he recorded the award-winning album at a “very difficult” moment in his life: in the middle of the pandemic and with his mother very sick, who later died of covid.
However, he assures that the music on the album “is happy”, a paradox that he himself does not understand. “I don’t know if through the joy of Haydn’s music I was able to comfort my sadness or redeem myself,” he adds.
The jury considers that De Solaun’s readings of Haydn ideally reflect his ability to interact with the works “in a symbiotic way and at the highest energy levels”, and affirms that “free from aesthetic dogmas, the pianist here creates a cosmos of solitary nature”.
The artist is grateful for the recognition, at the same time that he vindicates classical music, and believes that, like poetry, “it has its place in society”, although he acknowledges that this music requires a type of attention that he does not know to what extent the life that society leads today.
For his part, Carles Magraner was surprised by the award, since Capella de Ministrers already won in this same category with the album “Quattrocento” in 2018, but he celebrates the international recognition of the work that this Valencian group has been doing for more than 35 years. years.
In addition, he considers that it represents an opportunity for international projection and promotion for a type of music, early music, which is difficult to reach the public “in a world in which everything is so immediate” and where there is so much diversity and musical and cultural offer. .
“What we find in this music is subtlety, slowing down time. Attending a Capella de Ministrers concert is stopping the exacerbated vital rhythm in which we live and stopping to enjoy the small details, which is what gives us all pleasure ”, she defends.
For Magraner, “the biological rhythms of the human being continue to be with the musical rhythm”, and vindicates the need to create a music museum, similar to the Prado Museum, with which to disseminate the musical heritage and be able to reach all people .
According to Magraner, “El collar de la paloma” recovers “the musical environment around the literature of the book” by Ibn Hazm, and for this they have resorted to “Andalusian music and traditional Arab and Persian music, and improvisations”, with the in order to generate “a historical-cultural environment and an environment of what could have been the wealth of al-Andalus”. By Carla Aliño