Spanish composer Hèctor Parra receives the Alicia Award for his work “Constellations”.

Last night, coinciding with the celebrations of the European Day of Music, the Catalan Academy of Music announced the winners of the third edition of the Alicia Awards, at a ceremony held in the Oriol Martorell Hall of the Barcelona Auditorium.

With eleven award categories, only one, the Authorship category, went to a composer in the field of contemporary classical music, Hèctor Parra (Barcelona, 1976), awarded for his work Constellations (2020-2021), a poetic-musical cycle – the author of the poems is the Mallorcan poet Arnau Pons (Felanich, 1965) – based on the twenty-three small paintings on paper by the painter Joan Miró between 1939 and 1941, entitled Constellations. The work, for actor and piano four hands, will receive a live world premiere of seven of the 23 pieces on 30 July at the Mas Miró Foundation in the Tarragona town of Montroig, by the pianists and dedicators of the score, Carmen Martínez-Pierret and Imma Santacreu, with Pons himself as interpreter of the texts.

In addition to his musical career – developed at the Conservatori Superior de Música de Barcelona, the IRCAM in Paris and the University of Music of Geneva – Parra has also developed an artistic career in the Barcelona studio of Francesc Miñarro. His fascination for El Greco and Cézanne, whose pictorial textures he has sought to express through his music. Parra has lived in Paris since 2002, where he is currently a lecturer at IRCAM, at the Centre Pompidou.

In exactly one year’s time, on 22 June 2023, Hèctor Parra will give the world premiere at Bilbao’s Teatro Arriaga of his next chamber opera, Orgía, a co-production of Bilbao’s Teatro Arriaga, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu and the Festival de Peralada, which will feature a libretto by Calixto Bieito, in the third collaboration between the composer and the renowned stage director, after the large-scale operas Wilde (2015) and Les Bienveillantes (2019), in which Bieito was stage director.

© Photo downloaded from the website of Hèctor Parra’s music publishing house, Durand Salabert Eschig.