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The Grec celebrates 50 years with Estrella Morente and Maria del Mar Bonet
Barcelona will have one of those nights designed to remain in the memory on 20 July. The Teatre Grec will bring together Estrella Morente, Maria del Mar Bonet, Mayte Martín and other leading voices to celebrate the festival's 50 years with a concert that looks to the past, but also to the musical blend that has defined many summer nights in the city.
The show is titled Cançons del Grec: 50 anys de música, ponts i mestissatge and is presented as a one-off performance. It will not merely be a succession of performances, but a journey through half a century of songs, accents, influences and encounters that have made the Grec more than a stage event.
Alongside Morente, Bonet and Martín, Rosa Zaragoza, Borja Penalba, Meritxell Gené, Lucía Fumero and Tarta Relena will also take part. The line-up blends generations, styles and different ways of understanding the voice, from Mediterranean song to flamenco, the Nova Cançó, jazz and music travelling in both directions.
The proposal is co-produced by the Grec Festival de Barcelona and TRESC, together with the Taller de Músics. Artistic and musical direction is in the hands of Cristina López Gómez, while Pol Segarra i Carré and Àlex Serra Bonet take on the executive and artistic direction of the production.
On stage there will be a core band of ten musicians linked to Barcelona’s mestiza scene, coordinated by the Taller de Músics. They will be joined by a choir of twenty female voices led by Selma Bruna, inspired by the choruses of ancient Greece and adding an almost ritual dimension to the concert.
The repertoire aims to build bridges between Catalonia, the Mediterranean and other sonic territories. The idea is to recall how the Grec has functioned for decades as a meeting place, where Barcelona audiences have discovered artists, languages and traditions that did not always fit into the most predictable circuits.
The setting also matters to the event. The Teatre Grec, built for the 1929 International Exhibition on Montjuïc, once again takes centre stage on a night that connects cultural memory and an open-air experience. Few things sum up the Barcelona summer as much as listening to music in that amphitheatre as night falls.
The concert arrives as a celebration, but also as a way of explaining what the Grec has been for Barcelona: a festival capable of mixing theatre, dance, music and artistic risk without losing its connection to the city. Half a century later, that story will be sung in a single night, with voices that form part of the musical memory of several generations.