Cristina Pavarotti and Alberto García Demestres premiere 'Diario di una madre'

BarcelonaThis year's Peralada Festival is celebrating. Not only for its 40th anniversary, but because it commemorates a friendship of over forty years, that of Cristina Pavarotti and Alberto García Demestres. The daughter of tenor Luciano Pavarotti, as a lyricist, and the Barcelona musician as a composer, are responsible for Diario di una madre, a cycle of fourteen songs and two piano interludes that premieres at the festival this Sunday at 8 p.m. The interpretation will be performed by soprano Sabina Puértolas and pianist Rubén Fernández Aguirre, who will explore through music all the vital stages of a mother, from birth to death.

In addition to the almost family relationship with Pavarotti, García Demestres also celebrates life. After undergoing a double transplant two years ago and suffering from depression, the composer opens up: “Music has made me regain the sense of being a person, and that is why this work is made from the soul,” says Demestres. The musician explains that “just as Peralada surrounds itself with good friends to work with, who better than Cristina Pavarotti,” with whom he already premiered the opera La straordinaria vita di Sugar Blood in Peralada in 2017.

According to the festival's artistic director, Oriol Aguilà, the programming “opts for new creation and for projects that make Peralada a facilitator of summer dreams”. Aguilà also recalls that the project has the collaboration of the Italian Cultural Institute of Barcelona to foster this union between Catalan and Italian culture of the authors of the piece, and that the fact that the origin of the proposal dates back to 2019 highlights “the authenticity of the theme as a unique and rarely seen fact”.

Similarities between music and life experience

“We start from the word and, above all, from truthfulness,” explains Pavarotti, who has drawn on her life experience as a mother to create the texts. “There has always been a strong female presence in her home. The power of women and femininity have been present in her family,” she recalls.

In the same vein, the Aragonese soprano Sabina Puértolas expresses the similarity of the songs to the episodes in a mother's life. “We live too fast, and when I reviewed the texts, I reconnected with moments of my own that I might have rushed through,” says Puértolas, winner of the Premi Òpera XXI for best female voice. “The text also portrays difficult moments, like explaining death to a child, but these are also part of the maternal experience,” she adds.

The Basque pianist Rubén Fernández Aguirre emphasizes the interpretive difficulty of the work: “It’s a bitch in every sense: intensity, emotional control. Our responsibility is not just to interpret, but to have the capacity to maintain tension and manage feelings,” says the musician. Fernández Aguirre also believes that, at some points in the performance, “he feels he is not playing the piano, but rather becoming a painter at the mercy of the soprano.” In addition to the music, the concert will be accompanied by various photographs for each song that visually reflect the life moments of each stage.