DECEMBER 2016 | First Edition of ILAMS' Echoes Festival Closes to a Capacity Audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields

DECEMBER 2016 | First Edition of ILAMS' Echoes Festival Closes to a Capacity Audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields

The 25th November saw the close of ILAMS' new Autumn festival celebrating the very best in Latin Classical: Echoes Festival. A full house was in attendance to watch the Erato Piano Trio conclude the Festival at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a programme of rare chamber works by Enrique Granados. The concert followed a line-up of seven others which took place throughout November across some of London's most prestigious classical music venues, including St James's Piccadilly, the Wallace Collection, St Peter's Eaton Square and St John's Smith Square.

Echoes Festival aimed to showcase the vastly rich and vibrant classical music legacies of Latin America - and Iberia - which span more than five centuries and 22 countries across more than 21,000,000 km². With an estimated 1,000,000+ Latin people now residing in the UK, ILAMS has launched the Festival in order to foster a pluralistic appreciation of classical music within the wonderfully diverse country that is 21st-century Great Britain, to further promote a more bi-lateral understanding of British-Latin classical music relations.

The inspiration behind the naming of the Festival came from the Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar, who challenged the Eurocentric cultural view of Latin America as being 'merely a disfigured echo of what occurs elsewhere'. Retamar's vocabulary continues to strongly with the reception of Luso-Hispanic classical music across the world; music which has always shared an umbilical chord with Europe but which has also developed unique and original discourses of its own - discourses which have, in turn, produced their own 'echoes' in influencing European classical music-making practices.

The inaugural edition of Echoes Festival focused mainly on the 2016 centenary of the great Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916) who died in the English channel following a sojourn in the UK after his boat was torpedoed by the Germans. It also, however, marked the centenaries of Venezuelan composer Antonio Estévez (1916-1988) and Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983). Featuring some of the most authentic and illustrious voices in Latin Classical today, including the virtuoso Venezuelan concert pianist, Clara Rodríguez, Catalan guitarist Carles Trepat, Portuguese tenor Luis Gomes and TangOpera Duo, the Festival was inaugurated on the 2nd November with pre-eminent Spanish pianist José Menor, joined by the international flamenco star Nina Corti, classical guitarist Laura Snowden and The Latin Classical Chamber Orchestra.

Full Festival listings are available at www.ilams.org.uk/echoesfestival.org.uk.

ILAMS is planning a second edition of the Festival for the Autumn of 2017.

 

 

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