ENTRY WITH AN INVITATION.

A maximum of 2 invitations per person will be available at Ourense Tourist Office – 2, Isabel la Católica St. – the day of the concert, from 9 a.m. 

Carlos Núñez is known as one of the great international stars of Celtic music. His successfull career – with more than a million records sold – has been so extraordinary for an instrumentalist that it has eclipsed his academic training as peak flutist. However, his vision of Celtic music as historical music has made his concerts and recordings with Early Music maestros relatively frequent, as well as his symphonic concerts in some of the best classical music venues, such as Vienna Musikverein or the Boston Symphony Hall.

A couple of years ago Carlos Núñez conducted a very special concert at Santiago de Compostela cathedral, where he played for the first time all the instruments represented in the Portico de la Gloria, sculpted by Maestro Mateo in the 12th century. Last year he repeated this experience with Hespèrion XXI and Jordi Savall, a star of Early Music for more than four decades and who played for the first time these replicas of Galician medieval instruments.

Meanwhile and in the land of his father, Carlos Núñez visited the Diputación – Ourense regional goverment – workshop directed by luthier Manuel Brañas to know the Pórtico do Paraíso replicas he had made decades ago. He realized that although it is often said that this is a version of Santiago’s, Ourense instruments have little to do with them, some are much more similar to those represented in European musical iconography and others are very original, perhaps with some characteristics that make them unique. Last summer, he decided to put some of them back into use and to play them in the medieval concerts he made in Ourense region monasteries.

We already have several generations of Santiago replicas, which have been refined over the years, but we only have a first generation of Ourense’s. Considering this, the Diputación has invited maestro luthier Christian Rault to do a workshop to get new replicas of some of them, which will be played at tonight’s concert and will be available to all the musicians who want to play them in the future.

Carlos Núñez has been able to confirm the deep connection of these medieval instruments with traditional music. This has become the key to bring them back to life. Galicia is a privileged place since, to a large extent, all this medieval music has continued to live in oral tradition, starting with the bagpipe itself. Our worldwide famous bagpiper is determined to recover the centrality Galicia had in the Middle Ages, when millions of pilgrims traveled here taking their music and instruments with them. Even king Alfonso the X, known as The Wise King and who lived in Maceda and Allariz, two villages near Ourense, composed his songs or Cantigas in Galician language.