Joan Magrané premieres “Tenebrae Responsoria (Feria sexta in Parasceve)” at the second Easter edition of the Peralada Festival.
The Spanish composer Joan Magrané (Reus, 1988) is taking part this year in the second Easter edition of the Peralada Festival, which runs from 28 to 30 March. The festival’s artistic director, Oriol Aguilà, commissioned Magrané to write a responsory for the contemporary Catalan composer “with the greatest affinities to early music”. The Reus native will premiere his Tenebrae Responsoria (Feria sexta in Parasceve) in the church of El Carme on 29 March at eleven o’clock in the evening. Last summer, at the closing of the summer edition of the Festival de Peralada, the second edition of the Easter event was presented, in which Magrané spoke of his influences: “Couperin for the two solo voices (two sopranos, converted here into a soprano and a cello) and Gesualdo for the choice of texts”, and admitted that for several years he had been thinking about “putting music to the responsories of Holy Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Or to do so only on one of the three nights”.
For his Tenebrae Responsoria (Feria sexta in Parasceve) he imagined a work that would fuse vocal and instrumental music, “a path along which I have been trying to advance for some time now” and which would have a temporal dimension that would allow it to be offered as a concert, in which the soprano María Hinojosa, the cellist Pau Codina and the GIO Symphonia, all conducted by Francesc Prat, will take part.