Starting this Friday, 2 May, Calpe will host the second edition of the Calpe Piano Festival, which will bring together prestigious pianists from the national and international scene.
The concerts will be held at 8 pm every Friday in May at the Saló Blau, with free admission.
The festival will kick off with a performance by the renowned Bulgarian pianist Plamena Mangova, who has enjoyed a brilliant international career. Trained by Marina Kapatsinskaya at the State Academy of Music in Sofia, Bulgaria, and later at the Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid, she has performed with some of the most prominent orchestras, such as the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Radio France, Luxembourg, Tokyo, the Belgian National Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, the RTVE Symphony Orchestra in Madrid, and the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra, among others. He has received numerous awards, including second prize in the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Competition in 2007, as well as recognition in other competitions such as the Paloma O'Shea Piano Competition in Santander and the Vittorio Gui Chamber Music Competition in Florence.
On Friday 9 May, Carla Gómez from Alicante will perform. She completed her Higher Degree in Music, specialising in piano performance, at the Óscar Esplá Conservatory in Alicante with Professor Mª Dolores Costa. She has given concerts in Valencia, Murcia, Seville, the Canary Islands, Ghent (Belgium), Bari (Italy) and Warsaw (Poland), where she played at the National Philharmonic, as well as in the main concert halls of Alicante and its province, as a soloist, in chamber groups, with orchestras and with bands.
The Calpe Piano Festival will once again feature Hungarian pianist István I. Székely, who will perform on 16 May, following the success of his performance last year. A teacher at the Katarina Gurska Conservatory in Madrid and the Franz Liszt Centre for Young Talents in La Nucía, he has won several prizes in national and international competitions. He is an internationally renowned concert pianist and teacher, having been invited to give classes at various arts faculties and conservatories in Austria, Hungary, Israel, Serbia, Colombia and Spain. He is the founder and artistic director of the ‘Ciudad de Alicante’ Piano Competition, the Denia International Piano Festival, the Franz Liszt Centre International Piano Competition, the Great Piano Masters Competition, the Alicante International Piano Competition and the Sombor Philharmonic Orchestra in Serbia.
On 23 May, one of the most important Valencian pianists on the current piano scene, Rubén Talón, is scheduled to perform. In fact, critics consider him one of the best pianists of his generation and one of the most promising young musicians in Europe. He has won numerous national and international competitions in Spain, France, Italy, Austria and the United States, and has been recognised with special prizes for his performances of works by Manuel de Falla, Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninoff, as well as the Exceptional Talent Award in Salzburg.
The Calpe Piano Festival will close with an innovative performance, a four-handed concert by Russian pianist Natalia Kucháeva and Malaga-born Jorge Lechado. Natalia Kucháeva, born in Moscow, is completing her postgraduate studies at the Gnessin Academy in Moscow with maestro Vladimir Tropp. She has won numerous international competitions in Russia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Greece and Spain. She has also collaborated with the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville as a répétiteur for opera. She is currently a repertoire teacher at the Alfredo Kraus Chair at the Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid.
Jorge Lechado is professor of piano at the CSM in Malaga. He studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid with Joaquín Soriano and at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where he completed his postgraduate studies with pianist Pavel Nersessian. He has won awards and been a finalist in several national and international competitions.
The Councillor for Culture, Guillermo Sendra, said that the department ‘has made a significant effort to surpass last year's level’ and highlighted pianists of international renown such as Plamena Mangova, who ‘performs on the world's best stages and will also be performing in Calpe’, and István I. Székely, ‘who made a huge impression on the audience after his performance last year’. He added that Rubén Talón, Carla Gómez and the four-handed concert by Natalia Kucháeva and Jorge Lechado ‘will also surprise the audience with the high quality of their performances’.