Longest shutdown in 6 years: confinement
2020 has brought a unique and global situation that has left us housebound. Mandatory confinement due to COVID-19 has caused the temporary cessation of our activity for more than three weeks, something that had not happened since the quartet was formed in 2014.
It is a strange and logistically impractical time in the way a chamber ensemble works. We are each at our parents' house, separated. Without our main tool, the rehearsal, we decided at first to take a break and focus on individual study, on our own concerns, and to be with our own people.
As the weeks went by, we needed to find a way to capture our confinement, even without leaving home. This led to the recording of a very special videoclip: Vestida de Nit.
This arrangement of Silvia Pérez Cruz's song has a unique history. In 2017, we were performing at the graduation ceremony of our graduating class at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC). The godmother of that promotion was Silvia Perez Cruz herself, one of the most recognized singer-songwriters of her generation, who was once a student at ESMUC. We decided to make an arrangement of her habanera Vestida de Nit in the hope that she would dare to sing with us.
And so it was! A very special moment, and since then, when we have a concert in a coastal town, it accompanies us as an encore. It is a song that we love but we had never recorded before.
In confinement, missing the sea and longing to play together, we decided to record this song. We did it with our own means and dressing like fishermen. You can see it here:
The state of alarm also caused the cancellation of many concerts and projects. During the month of May we were to carry out the second edition of our pedagogical project at ESMUC, Kebyart Meets ESMUC Saxophone Ensemble, where in an intensive meeting we conducted and played the Ensemble and performed a final concert. The meeting could not take place, and we decided to record an excerpt of one of the works each one from home:
After two and a half months, on June 1st we started rehearsing again. This year will be very particular, but for the moment, we are back to making music together and we will prepare with great enthusiasm the summer concerts.