The benchmark library centre managed by the Directorate General of Culture of the Regional Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports is celebrating World Poetry Day on the 21st of March with the concert Cantando a las poetas del 27 (Singing to the poets of ’27) by pianist and singer Sheila Blanco.

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Concert by Sheila Blanco in the Palma Public Library

World Poetry Day is a day to honour poets, revive the oral tradition, promote the writing and reading of poetry and encourage the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, painting and music. For this reason the Palma Public Library “Can Sales” has invited a great artist, the pianist, composer and singer Sheila Blanco, to offer the concert Cantando a las poetas del 27 on the 21st of March at 6:30 pm.

Sheila Blanco has had a long career as a jazz singer, and is known for fusing texts with music, both classical and pop, rock, folk and jazz, creating a symbiosis between artistic languages, with a very personal style. Her work is also very much focused on the vindication and recovery of Spanish women writers, whose lyrics she has carefully adapted to music.

In this concert, accompanied only by piano music, Sheila gives voice and rhythm to a selection of poems by some of the best female poets of the Generation of ’27, interpreting music that delves into the emotions that permeate their poetry books and that deal with universal themes, personalised in the lives of each poet, such as love, pain, exile, beauty, sorrow, remorse…

Some of these poetesses are Carmen Conde, the first woman to become a member of the RAE; Ernestina de Champourcin, nominated for the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature; Concha Méndez, surrealist poet and founder of the Verónica printing press; Pilar de Valderrama, poet and playwright and founder of the Teatro Íntimo Fantasio; and Margarita Ferreras, author of Pez en la tierra.

After more than three years of research, Sheila selected the poems that most inspired her and adapted them to be sung on the piano. In this way, the singer aims to raise awareness of, as well as pay tribute to, these women who have been unjustly erased and forgotten from the literary generation to which they belong.

During the show, the protagonist introduces each of these women authors and the poems she sings in order to contextualise them. Finally, before the end of the concert, Sheila performs two more poems, one written and composed by herself and dedicated to these writers, and another by Rosalía de Castro, the only female reference point for the authors of that generation.