Lídia Pujol and Carlos Nuñez, headliners at the Joan Brudieu International Music Festival

La Seu d'Urgell (CNA) .- The Galician piper Carlos Nuñez and the Catalan singer Lydia Pujol are the main acts of the 35th International Joan Brudieu Music Festival that takes place in La Seu d’Urgell in the Catalan Pyrenees. This year, the event, famous for its classical concerts, is characterised marked by a tight budget that has been reduced by 25%, from 60,000 Euros in 2009 to just 40,000 this year. The Cultural Council of La Seu,  Miquel Colom, said that the festival has reduced its budget, but has kept the quality of its musical offer. The artistic director, Josep Maria Sauret, said that the Nuñez and Pujol concerts will include music that links classical and traditional tendencies, even though they are probably the least “classical musicians” of those present this year.

The International Joan Brudieu Music Festival has been affected by the economic crisis and as well as undergoing a steep budget cut, the number of concerts has been reduced from seven to six this year. The festival is held between the 13th of July and the 24th of August and will have two main stages: the Sant Doménech hall and the cloister of the Cathedral of La Seu. The artistic director of the event remarked that the Cloisters of the Cathedral is a 'wonderful place' in which musicians are 'pleased to have the chance to be able to act. "

As well as Nuñez and Pujol, the two concerts that will take place in the cloister, there will be other concerts, such as the ExaudiNos Orchestra Chamber that will perform John Brudieu’s Mass of Death;  the Choir Chamber Palace at the Palau de la Musica  Catalana that will interpret some of Brahms love waltzes; Maksym Dyedikov and Juan Barahona will offer  Beethoven, Brahms and Shuman ’s romantic music and the accordion duo Jeux d'Anches, made up of Serbs Marko Sevarlic and Nilola Kerkez, who will play excerpts from Falla, Stravinsky and Piazzola.

Sauret wanted to emphasize ExaudiNos’s concert that will interpret the music of Brudieu, a composer of chapel music at La Seu during the Renaissance, and which 'serves as a link' between traditional and classical music. Suaret explained that one of the main goals of the festival is to ‘recover his musical heritage' a task cariied out by the Exaudinos orchestral.

The festival opens with Carlos Nuñez, at the Cathedral cloister on the 13th of July with a concert entitled Alborada do Brazil in which he reinterprets Brazilian music in a Celtic way. It closes with Lídia Pujol, also at the cloister on the 24th of August. Pujol will present The Lovers of Lilith, a project in which Pujol recovers songs that refer to women from all over the Països Catalans (Catalan-speaking countries).