| The METAMORPHICS, a Santa Fe band, features four musicians and a narrator in a performance/educational based concert. Fernando Barros, a composer and vocalist from Granada, Spain, has dedicated his talents to combining unusual pairings: Cervantes and Shakespeare, the Medievalists and Spanish poets, and now Federico Garcia Lorca and Leonard Cohen. Mr. Barros will also sing his own compositions which include the lyrics of Lorca, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramon Jimenez and Miguel de Cervantes. The band members are Tito Rios of Bolivia on guitar together with original melodic solos; Brian Nelson of the U.S. on a wide variety of percussive instruments from around the world; and Juan Aniceto of Peru playing the bass violin with accompanying rhythms and bowed melodies. Rounding out this performance is narration and translation by Melissa Moore, a 26-year resident of Santa Fe. All of the group’s members are educators and specialists in their own fields. The idea of musical metamorphosis is equivalent to what we observe in nature: taking a nascent idea all the way to its most beautiful reveal. In combining the poetic and narrative works of Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet of the early 1900’s and revered today as the epitome of metaphysical imagery and social/political insights, his writings highly influenced an emerging Montreal youth, Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s comprehension of Lorca’s poetry led him, at the beginning, to emulate the Spaniard’s voice and later to provide inspiration to a generation of his audiences with his own penetrating observations, pathos and promise. Added to this poetic gift, Cohen derived most of his musical compositions from six flamenco chords, again paying homage to the Spanish culture and ethos. In melding the two, Fernando Barros, has created a new form of presenting and preserving the arts of two eras and continents: «fitting the melodic hand of Cohen to the poetic glove of Lorca.» Interspersed in the concert are vignettes of stories and recitation of poetry designed to illuminate and reveal these original voices to our time. |
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