If it’s July in San Sebastian, then it’s time for Jazzaldia, the annual jazz festival. Despite the rampant spread of the delta variant, the show did go on with similar COVID safety protocols to last year's event. We saw two great shows, both in outdoor settings.
The first concert was a solo piano recital by Marcin Masecki, a Polish pianist, who performed ragtime music. Jeff chose this concert, and it was a real winner. Unlike last year’s soloist, Masecki spoke to the audience (in Spanish) before each piece, providing a bit of information and history about the artist. Most fascinating was how he got into performing ragtime in the first place: he was inspired by the ragtime music he heard at Disneyland as a child. Ragtime became his passion and he started focusing on it more and more, including composing original pieces. It was easy to know that the music brings him great joy because we could watch his feet energetically dance under the piano while he played – we had a great view from our first-row seats in the cloister of the San Telmo Museum (a former monastery).
The second concert was Noa & Gil Dor, an Israeli duo, who performed with Inaki Salvador, a local pianist. There was an opening performance by Naissam Jalal & Rhythms of Resistance. Jalal is a Syrian flutist who lives in Paris. Her performance was enjoyable but not as dynamic as the main act.
Noa has a captivating voice and knows how to connect with her audience. She spoke almost exclusively in Spanish, while singing in English, Hebrew, Spanish, and even Basque. The selections played from her 2019 album “Letters to Bach” were marvelous – it is worth checking out her unique tribute to J.S. Bach. But the most special moment was when she sang as her final encore “Txoria Txori,” a Basque song that is considered a piece of resistance against the Franco regime’s prohibition of the Basque language, and a current symbolic yearning for independence. It is based on a poem about a how a caged bird loses its essence and can no longer be considered a bird. Listening to the audience sing along was incredibly moving. She truly held the crowd in the palm of her hand.
We are already looking forward to next year’s festival. Hopefully COVID security measures will be a thing of the past by then.
Hasta pronto,
Shana & Jeff
No comments:
Post a Comment