The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) inaugurates its cultural program for 2025 next Thursday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m., with a lecture given by the composer and performer Amancio Prada, Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2011. In the words of the protagonist: “More than a lecture, it will be a celebration of the transforming flight of poetry and music.” The event will take place at the Institution's headquarters, in Taro de Tahíche, and will also be broadcast live through the FCM website and YouTube channel.
Under the title The Thread of the Canticle, Prada will take a journey through more than 50 years of concerts, cities, friends and experiences, all intertwined by the Spiritual Canticle of Saint John of the Cross, which the artist set to music to turn it into a classic reference of contemporary Spanish music. This path begins in a modest chambre de bonne in Paris —where he read and sang the verses of the mystic poet for the first time in the autumn of 1969, when he was barely twenty years old— and continues through unforgettable stages and encounters.
It is an intimate journey in which Amancio Prada will not only talk about cities marked by the footprint of Friar John, but will also talk about friends and essential figures in his personal and professional career, such as Silicio Félix Pardo, Gerald Brenan, Juan Gil-Albert, Joaquín Verdú, María Zambrano, Chillida, Carmen and Ana Martín Gaite, Alejandro Massó, José Ángel Valente, José Luis Gómez and Manuel Ventero, among others. All interconnected by the subtle and powerful thread of the Canticle.
This conference is part of the space for meeting between creators and the public entitled The author and his work. A multidisciplinary forum in which guests talk about the relationship they have with their creative work and review some of the constants that guide their dedication. José Saramago, José Ángel Valente, Susan Sontag, Alberto Corazón, Juan Gelman, Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Martín Gaite, Eduardo Galeano, Iñaki Ábalos, Ángeles Mastretta, Günter Grass, Eduardo Mendoza, Rosa Montero or, recently, Sergio Ramírez, among others, have participated in this forum.
Amancio Prada's musical work (Dehesas, León, 1949) as a composer and performer has always had a literary basis. Throughout his discography, he has been shaping an anthological journey through peninsular lyrics, from the cantigas of the first Galician-Portuguese troubadours (12th-13th centuries), through the romancero, Juan del Enzina, Jorge Manrique, San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro, to contemporary authors such as Federico García Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, María Zambrano, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Carmen Martín Gaite, Agustín García Calvo, Luis López Álvarez, Antonio Pereira and Juan Carlos Mestre, which he completes with his own songs.
His dedication has been recognized in France, Italy and Spain where, among other awards, he has received the Castelao Medal of Galicia (1995), the Castilla y León Arts Award (2005), the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2011), the Galician Culture Award (2019), the VII Culture Award from the University of Seville (2020) and the distinction from the European Guitar Foundation (2021).
