Aaron Zapico

Forma Antiqva, María Hinojosa, Aarón Zapico – La Caramba (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:12 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Winter & Winter

In 2019, the head of Cardinal Belluga [Motril, 1662 – Roma, 1743] fell and rolled along the floor. The stern, skull-capped, sculpted head of the moralist from Motril could not bear to face the Teatro Calderón de la Barca in aeternum, and so detached itself from the rest of his body. The fevered imagination of Luis Antonio de Belluga y Moncada regarded theatre, music, dance and, above all, women as the devil’s tools for inoculating man with sin. He recorded this in hundreds of pages and pastoral letters, where he detailed, with suspicious delight, the potential »gravely sinful« circumstances arising from dancing likely to encourage groping, the adornments and measure- ments of women’s clothing, and the comedies and sainetes that he implored Philip V to ban. Nevertheless, divine intentions are inscrutable. Seven years after his death, the very antithesis of his being was born in Motril: María Antonia Vallejo Fernández, one of the most popular and influential artists of the last third of the 18th century. Known as La Caramba, she became the true quintessence of the sin envisaged by her illustrious fellow countryman: star of the sainete and the tonadilla, actress, singer, dancer, entrepreneur, free woman and mistress of several lovers. In short, a charismatic eighteenth-century ‘influencer’ capable of moving the masses, upsetting the powers that be, and dictating fashions in dress and adornment—those that the cardinal said caused »infinite offences to God«. Thanks to the tireless work of this woman ahead of her time, today we enjoy countless musical treasures that sparkle with audacity, brashness and wit, embodied in that genre, tonadilla escénica, which is yet to be studied in full.

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