Juan March Foundation – Minimalismore

Miguel Ángel Marín: “MarchVivo will be a reflection of the best of our heritage”.

Three record releases a year. This is the objective that the Fundación Juan March has set itself with MarchVivo, the classical music label that began its journey last October with the simultaneous release of its first three releases: Mompou Live, which offers the recording of a concert that the pianist and composer Federico Mompou gave on 19 January 1977 at the Foundation’s Madrid headquarters, in which he performed one of his main works, Volume IV of his Música callada, commissioned by the Foundation from the Barcelona-born pianist. This is the only live recording of this score by Mompou.
On the second disc, Bach (Re)inventions, the Spanish pianist Moisés Patricio Sánchez reworks Johann Sebastian Bach’s Inventions for two voices BWV 772-786 in the key of jazz, accompanied by bass and percussion, in a recording made in October 2020. Finally, the third disc is dedicated to a previously unpublished work by Roberto Gerhard, La noche de San Juan. The recording of the original piano version was made at the same time as the premiere performances of the ballet at the Auditorio de la Fundación Juan March in June 2021, by the pianist Miguel Baselga.
The recording project arises, as Miguel Ángel Marín, director of the Fundación Juan March’s Music Programme since 2009, explains in a telephone conversation, as a “natural evolution” of the Foundation’s musical activity. “The building of the Madrid headquarters was inaugurated in 1975 and from the beginning concerts were programmed. And, in fact, from 1976 or 1977 some of these began to be recorded”.
From 1994 the Wednesday concerts also began to be broadcast on Radio Clásica of Radio Nacional de España and in 2009, the year in which Marín became director of the Fundación Juan March’s Music Programme, the decision was taken to record all the concerts, “not selectively as before, but systematically”. Today, Marín explains, “there is an audiovisual heritage of more than a thousand concerts recorded in audio and video”.
The creation of the record label and the presentation of the recordings on the new channels of digital platforms, which was an idea that had been around the Foundation for some time, was accelerated by the pandemic. MarchVivo is going to be a reflection of the best of our heritage,” says Marín. We will release three recordings a year, in physical and digital format, approximately every four months, with a regular pattern, probably in March or April, at the end of June and in October”.
Marín does not assure that the recordings will always be of contemporary music – “The identity of the label is live recordings held here, with very distinctive or striking features, and with the emphasis on Spanish music, either by the composer or the performer” – but he does warn that the Canal March, which can be accessed from the Foundation’s website, allows all recorded content to be viewed: concerts, lectures, musical theatre, interviews, etc. We have been very focused on our channel for some time now,” Marín assures us. Our programme of contemporary concerts in recent years is very extensive. Since 2009 we have been recording everything on video. And there are works by all the composers you mention (Erkoreka, Magrané, García Tomás, etc.). And there is always Radio Clásica, with the Wednesday concerts”.