The BBVA Foundation announces the winners of its research and creation grants.

In the 2022 edition, sixty projects have been selected from among the 884 submitted, from a wide range of areas of science and culture, including basic sciences, mathematics, biology and biomedicine, environmental and earth sciences, engineering and information technologies, economics, social and legal sciences, humanities, music and opera, and literary creation and performing arts.

The Leonardo Grants are endowed with a maximum gross amount of 40,000 euros and are aimed at a group that is at a decisive moment in their professional development: researchers and creators between 30 and 45 years of age, at an intermediate stage in their careers, who on a large number of occasions, mainly due to an unfavourable socio-labour context in recent decades, have not been able to find a sufficiently stable job, or have not been able to deploy all their skills in the ideation and management of projects.

In the category of music and opera, the recipients of the grants are the composer and sound artist Alberto Bernal (Madrid, 1978), the pianist and composer Lluís Capdevila (Falset, Tarragona, 1981), the baroque flautist Luis Martínez Pueyo (Zaragoza, 1988), the percussion teacher Luis Martínez Pueyo (Saragossa, 1988), and the professor of percussion, the percussion and chamber music teacher Joan Pons Carrascosa (Albalat de la Ribera, Valencia, 1983), the pianist Noelia Rodiles (Oviedo, 1985) and the pianist and teacher Francisco Soriano (Seville, 1976).

The winning projects presented by the musicians, teachers and composers are the following:

– Alberto Bernal: iSlaveYou [musical-scenic work for 4 performers, 2 dancers and projected tuits], a musical-scenic project that will address the contraposition between the playful element of everyday electronic devices and the alienating and enslaving work of those who produce them, the so-called i-slaves. The dialogue between percussion, which evokes the mechanical work of the i-slaves, and the oboes, which represent entertainment, articulates the basis of a discourse that expands towards the corporal performativity of two dancers and whose dramaturgy will be formed by projected tweets, in a process that is deconstructed through sound ruptures, transgressions and an unbalancing reflection through the flow of tweets.

– Lluís Capdevila: Mompou Revisited – Impressions íntimes, a jazz piano trio album reinterpreting the work Impressions íntimes by Frederic Mompou (1893-1987). This piece, Capdevila explains, “is the music he wrote without having hardly studied music, where we can practically hear its centre with total transparency”. The project will orchestrate for piano, drums and double bass a work designed for solo piano and, in Capdevila’s words, “it will not be a revision without creation, but in all the pieces there will be piano improvisations that will build on Mompou’s ideas, as well as new introductions and added ideas, adding rhythms of modern 20th century music, interludes and original endings”.

– Joan Pons Carrascosa: José Evangelista: Study of the influence of Gamelan on his music and audiovisual recording of his work for percussion instruments, a book that will investigate the influence of the musical tradition of Indonesia – and specifically the gamelan – on the work of the Spanish composer José Evangelista on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, which he will celebrate in 2023. The book will include a memory card with audiovisual files corresponding to the recording of four works by Evangelista (Concert pour marimba et ensemble de percussion, La Porte (selection), Interplay and Monodías españolas), which will also be made available free of charge on audio and video platforms.

– Noelia Rodiles: Two contemporary Spanish concertos for piano and orchestra: Partita no. 4 by Julián Orbón and Cloches by Manuel Martínez Burgos, the recording and release on disc of two contemporary Spanish works for piano and orchestra. On the one hand, the Partita No. 4 (1985) by Julián Orbón, which, despite its premiere in 1987 in the United States, did not reach Spain until 1989, when it was first performed by Noelia Rodiles. The other work is Cloches, by Manuel Martínez Burgos. This composer – winner, among others, of the III Premio Internacional de Composición Fundación BBVA-Auditorio Nacional de Música, in 2012 – will write it for its world premiere in November 2023 at the Jornadas de piano Luis Iberni in Oviedo, by the Oviedo Filarmonía, conducted by Lucas Macías and with Noelia Rodiles as soloist.

– Francisco Soriano: L’ Andalousie au coeur: a recording of the complete Spanish songs of Pauline Viardot-García, the first world recording of the complete Spanish songs of Pauline Viardot-García (1821-1910), a French opera singer and composer of Spanish origin who triumphed in the 19th century. She had artistic and intellectual connections with Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, George Sand, Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod and Ivan Turgenev, among others. She was also one of the introducers of Spanish popular rhythms in 19th-century European music, which inspired everything from Bizet’s opera Carmen to the music of Maurice Ravel and Debussy, well into the 20th century. Her musical oeuvre includes operettas, chamber music and numerous songs and lieder in French, Russian, Italian, German and Spanish.

– Luis Martínez Pueyo: Incipit Lamentatio. The world’s first recording of Easter Lamentations by Francesco Corselli (1705-1778). Heritage recovery in collaboration with Ars Hispana, a collaborative project between the early music group La Guirlande (founded by him) and the group of musicologists of the Ars Hispana Association, to carry out the research, recovery and recording of 5 Easter Lamentations by Francisco Corselli (1705-1778) never before recorded. These are lamentations from his early period, characterised by their contrasts of character, as well as the use of transverse flutes in the instrumentation, and which demonstrate the great compositional quality of the composer who was master of the Royal Chapel under the kings Philip V, Ferdinand VI and Charles III. All the works on the disc will be world premieres, which will help to fill one of the many gaps that persist in the dissemination of Spanish musical heritage.