The new voice of ancient Sefardic music
Mara Aranda is going to appear at the BRQ Vantaa Music Festival in Finland at the 11th of August.
Mara Aranda is one of the internationally best known interprets of Sefardic Music. In 2015 she visited Warsaw (Poland), in order to continue her tour in Prague (Czech Republic), Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Sofia (Bulgaria). Her tour was organized by the Spanish embassies to celebrate the admittance of the Sefardic jews in the Ottoman Empire. In each of those very special venues she presented her Sephardic Legacy program, the same she will perform during the BRQ Vantaa Festival of baroque music.
Mara Aranda. Vocals and percussion http://www.mara-aranda.com
Mara will be accompanied by an expert in playing the hurdy-gurdy and citoles medievales, an excellent interpreter of those instruments, usual member of formations performing ancient music like Eduardo Paniagua, Capella de Ministers or Axivil. With those lately he finished some recordings and concerts as well, respectively contributing with the unique timbre of his instruments, outstanding facsimiles. Since 1980 he is on stage all over the world to present medieval as well as ancient Spanish music, in the course of the most prestigious festivals.
Jota Martinez. Citoles, hurdy-gurdy, Moorish guitar and Turkish lute http://www.jota-martinez.com
Abel Garcia, a musician of Valencia, Ethno musicologist and expert in hurdy-gurdy and instruments of oriental tradition completes the trio for the festival. Because of his passion for those instruments he even got the chance to study Baglama in Istanbul with maestros like Devrim Aydin and Oran Ockal, and he did so alike on the island of Crete studying lute with the maestros Stelios Petrakis and Giorgis Xilouris. His work is a reference for traditional and contemporary music as well.
At the moment Mara as a composer and interpret is working on her new CD after doing sound research and investigation in Jerusalem during a scholarship granted by Fundación Autor, Madrid, the CD will be released in December 2016.
Mara Aranda is an icon and yet has a place in the history of the grand dames of the Mediterranean. In order to celebrate career, music and success, in 2015 she released her latest disco “Mare Vostrum”, where influences, inspirations and emotions converge and for which she received the award “Best disco of Folk”, just as her preceding publications “Lo testament” and “Déria” did. Both also received the prize for the best disco of Folk in the year of their appearance.
In 2015 gone by she commemorated 25 years of performing on major European stages, leaving behind 1000 concerts in which Mara reinterpreted Turkish, Greek, Occitan an ancient music. In the last decades she moreover undertook important research regarding the inexhaustible repertoire of oriental and occidental Sefardic music in order to distinguish the
importance of the music and the songs which for generations were part of daily Jewish life in the Iberian peninsula, in the north of Africa and later in the Ottoman empire.
http://www.brq.fi/en/taiteilijat/mara-aranda
