On Saturday 20 April at 7pm, the concert pianist and guitarist Samuel Diz, the Argentinian tenor Jonatan Alvarado and readings by the writer Elena Medel will open the first event in the Mulier series at the Serrería Belga (The Belgian Sawmill) Cultural Space, in which music, literature and gastronomy come together from a perspective that places women at the centre of the creative process.

On the evening of 20 April, under the title ‘Memory of Melancholy’, the musicians will perform works such as ‘Española’ by Rosita García Ascot; ‘The Third of June’ by Elena Romero; ‘Tribute to Debussy’ by Manuel de Falla; ‘The Dove was Wrong’ (Se equivocó la paloma) by Carlos Guastavino, as well as a number of songs either written or collected by the composer Gustavo Durán.

Samuel Diz will perform these works on a facsimile of the guitar built by José Ortega in Granada, with which Federico García Lorca tried, as he himself said, “to drag out” the first notes of ‘Tribute to Debussy’.

Love, or the impossibility of sharing it, is the main theme of the songs that Gustavo Durán composed or collected in his three unpublished musical notebooks, along with the nostalgia inherent in the melodies of Elena Romero and Carlos Guastavino, and the melancholy of exile that pervades the memoirs of the writer María Teresa León, whose pages, read by Elena Medel, weave the musical constellations of this concert. All this will be accompanied by the work of Manuel de Falla and his disciple García Ascot, who would gradually trade music for art during his exile in Mexico where he became the owner of the Diana Art Gallery (1954-1965).

The evening’s activities include a light supper with allusions to phonographic testimonies from the early 20th century and with the writer María Teresa León taking centre stage, sharing tapas with her artistic circle.

Four concerts that bring together a female perspective, music, literature and gastronomy

This series of four concerts between April and June, in which music and literature go hand in hand, focuses on creative women: the writer or composer, but also the translator, the patron of the arts, the lighting designer or the manager of an artistic creation that they now bring to the stage and offer to the public.

These concerts will also be accompanied by a light supper related to the context or to the musical or literary theme of each event, thus immersing the audience in the different eras represented not only through music and literature but also through the sense of taste. These small gastronomic delicacies will be chosen for their relation to one or more of the texts or songs performed, or to the gastronomic culture of the artists’ home countries.