Choral Music And The Torrent de Pareis

For visitors to Valldemossa, the name of Josep Coll Bardolet will be a familiar one. This painter, originally from the province of Gerona in Catalonia, lived in Valldemossa from 1944. He died in 2007 but two years before his death the foundation which bears his name was constituted. It is the Fundación Cultural Coll Bardolet.

In 1963 he hit on the idea of making part of the landscape of the Tramuntana mountains where he lived come alive in a different way to his paintings. He wanted to create a symbiosis between that landscape and music. The landscape he chose was one of the most remarkable even for this remarkable part of Mallorca. It was the Torrent de Pareis in Sa Calobra. The following year the first choral concert was held in Sa Calobra. It is now in its fifty-second year.

Choral work was a minority interest but one that Coll Bardolet wished to expand, and by linking it to this natural area - declared a natural monument in 2003 - he was to give choral work the opportunity to indeed flourish. It can, today, appear strange that the interest was as minority as it was, when pretty well any town can boast its own choir, or more than one, and when some have acquired particularly strong reputations - Sa Pobla's for instance, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last year. But as with mostly all of Mallorca's cultural history, the politics can never be ignored: these politics have helped to shape or undermine the culture.

In the Mallorcan context, the politics of culture are linked inextricably to language, and where choirs are concerned, language was important in their development. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Balearics had been one of only three regions of Spain where a choral tradition - other than church choirs - had begun to be established. But this interest in the Balearics was nothing compared with that of Catalonia and, to a lesser extent, Valencia. Choirs, therefore, were far more of a Catalan phenomenon than Castellano, Basque or Galician. Despite this, towards the end of the century, choirs in Mallorca were in need of fresh impetus, and it was to come from the composer Antoni Noguera. He it was who brought about a genuine choral movement in Catalan. In 1897 he founded the Capella de Manacor and this swiftly inspired the forming of choirs in, for example, Llucmajor, Pollensa and Porreres.

Further upheaval was of course to come, which is why, in 1963, Coll had his ambition to revive a choral tradition that had been pushed into the background. Initially, the concert was an intimate affair to which his friends and acquaintances of would come. When the Capella Mallorquina choir, founded in 1966, became involved from 1968, the by then annual concerts were to enjoy increasing success as awareness of them grew. In 1972 the Capella Mallorquina was received as an "Obra Social" by Sa Nostra bank, at which point the concert began to be financed indirectly by the bank: the association with Obra Social Sa Nostra continues to this day through the Fundación Caixa de Baleares, it having taken on responsibility for the concert organisation in 1984.

The Capella Mallorquina was joined by the Camerata Sa Nostra (the chamber orchestra which bears the bank's name) and the concerts would occasionally also feature the choir from Lluc. Over the years the concerts have broadened their appeal while still retaining the essence of choral work. Among groups which have taken part are The Swingle Singers and the Bronzeville American Gospel choir.

The popularity of the concert is now such that for its fiftieth anniversary in 2013, some 4,000 people came to hear the group Cap Pela (not the same as Capella Mallorquina) and the choir of the Balearics University. And so we come to this year's concert, which is being held this afternoon There will be two acts - the women's choir Minuet, which was formed by the Bunyola School of Music nearly ten years ago, and Le Carromato, a group of four musicians who combine the music of swing, jazz, bossa nova and even Irish folk with a special brand of visual humour. Minuet perform music with a very wide range - from traditional Mallorcan to spiritual and to Leonard Bernstein and Lennon and McCartney.

Both are first-class acts, but then this would be expected for a first-class occasion as this concert, one with the fabulous setting of the Torrent de Pareis and one that is a tribute to Josep Coll Bardolet, whose idea it was all those years ago.