The Música en Segura stages, a festival of 10

Daniel Broncano (Jaén, 1986) says that good ideas always come to him in the shower but that the one from the festival that he put on, now ten years ago, in Segura de la Sierra occurred to him, already neat, in the London subway

The Música en Segura stages, a festival of 10

Daniel Broncano (Jaén, 1986) says that good ideas always come to him in the shower but that the one from the festival that he put on, now ten years ago, in Segura de la Sierra occurred to him, already neat, in the London subway. "I was studying at the Royal College of Music at the time and was making a living as a freelance clarinetist," he recalls. «But that gray morning, locked in a carriage on the way to an audition, I became paranoid: I thought that some William Christie on duty would discover the Cazorla Natural Park and put on a series of concerts in my land».

Thus began his slow but unstoppable transition into music management. "I did the first edition of the Segura Music festival by ear, without the slightest notion of organizing concerts," he testifies in a comic register that he shares with his brother, the comedian David Broncano. «He was so in diapers that he did not even contemplate the possibility of putting a piano in a church, as we have done later, because he was unaware that the legs could be removed». The formula was a success and allowed him to extend the programming to November and in other places in this uninhabited region. "I always say that it was the festival that made me and not the other way around."

From May 24 to 28, Música en Segura will once again fill empty Spain with 15 shows spread across "everyday and unusual" spaces, such as the oil factory, the medieval castle, the Orcera cemetery and the Moralejos village threshing floor . «International figures of the stature of the Cremona Quartet, the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble, the singer Israel Fernández, the Portuguese artist Carminho and the National Dance Company, to name just a few, will visit us», continues Broncano. "If all goes well, we hope to beat our own attendance record, which in the last call reached 15,000 spectators."

Broncano's proposal is unique in its kind, but it has drawn on "certain influences" from other festivals: such as The Sounds of the Dolomites ("which fuses hiking and melomania"), the Ruhr Triennial ("with its conquest of industrial environments ") and the Aldeburgh Festival ("a good example of cultural development through the countryside").

It's been four years since the former director of the Cuenca Religious Music Week and now manager of the Cordoba Orchestra has not drawn his clarinet again. "I realized that my site was offstage." He has plenty of talent, but it has not always been easy: in 2013, shortly before opening Música en Segura, his wife, the New Zealand mezzo Felicity Smith, died unexpectedly. "The festival is my baby. Carrying it out was a way of completing what I started with her."

In addition to breakfast at dawn with Anacronía, the musical excursion through the Herrerías de Río Madera, the "unpasteurized" polyphonic singing of Sardinia, a recital by the pianist Judith Jáuregui and a semi-staged version of Mozart's The Kidnapping in the Seraglio of the City of Granada Orchestra, the festival will premiere "entre tumbas" the Burial Quintet for strings in the cemetery and rural piano composed for the occasion by Fernando Velázquez. "This is proof that classical music can and should leave the auditoriums," celebrates the director. "Everything here is so different and special that sometimes I think someone will wake me up to tell me that I'm still in London and that I missed the stop."

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