Depending on your age, you may know her as Cecilia, although she was christened Evangelina Sobredo Galanes. She was the daughter of a soldier with close ties to the Franco regime, which didn’t prevent some of her compositions from being banned by the censors. She sang about life as we know it and avoided using her music to propagate a specific ideology, although the veneer of innocence that covered her songs only partly veiled clearly feminist viewpoints and patent calls for freedom and social justice. Ramito de violetas [Bunch of Violets], Soldadito de plomo [Toy Soldier] and Amor de medianoche [Midnight Love] may seem inoffensive, but they really weren’t in the prevailing political and social context of the time when they were first released. She died in a car accident in 1976, but in the 1990s she was hailed as one of the most outstanding Spanish singers of the 1970s, which explains why people have never stopped playing her songs.
Now, Lídia Pujol, a multi-faceted artist who is always keen to activate and share critical thought and the spiritual side of life — as she did with her Iter Luminis project — and has performed poetry and theatre in collaboration with Sergi Belbel, Santiago Auserón, Lluís Danès, Mayte Martín, Albert Pla, Sílvia Comes and Lluís Llach, to name just a few, opens a dialogue with the late singer-songwriter from Madrid through her compositions. The Barcelona artist performs Cecilia’s songs with the original arrangements, while placing emphasis on the lyrics. Themes that invite us to question everything, starting with ourselves and our inner circles, to stop listening to the noise of the world and to ask ourselves who we are and what our deepest desires really are. Once again, Lídia Pujol asks us the questions posed by the voice of Cecilia, who, as the intellectual Marina Garcés says , "always leave you with something still to be answered, so they can be revisited, thought about, listened to and sung. That’s why they can never be an anachronism".
Music performed by: Lídia Pujol, Dani Espasa, Pau Figueres, Miquel Àngel Cordero, Carlos Montfort Photography: Marc Javierre Kohan, Jaume Aragay
