2024-08-04 21:43:39
Pianist and composer, actor and theatre director, compulsive entrepreneur and voracious observer of the ins and outs of cultural consumption, Facundo Ramirez He is doing a thousand things at once. Always. Combining is part of his nature and in these combinations he achieves the balances that make up a personal artistic profile, which in the multiplicity of the present finds the time to present Argentine planthe album he released last year with his pianistic reflections on music by Atahualpa Yupanqui, Eduardo Lagos, Carlos Guastavino, Alberto Ginastera and Astor Piazzollaas well as his own works and those of his father, Ariel.
For three Fridays in August, between the 9th and the 23rd, Ramírez will perform at 9 p.m. Classic and Modernthe historic space for music, books, plastic arts and other avatars of culture at Callao 892, reopened a few months ago. “I always try to undertake things, I have an unbreakable will to generate, I don’t wait for them to call me,” Ramírez summarizes at the beginning of the conversation with Page 12.
“In its various aspects, Music and theatre continually inspire me and I try to respond to all the creative stimuli they produce in me.. “Doing several things at the same time comes naturally to me,” continues the pianist and actor. “This dual characteristic, which I once assumed perhaps without calculating how far it could go, often brings me intense moments, like this one,” continues Ramírez, who in addition to a series of recitals with Julia Zenko –On August 24th they will be at the Teatro Metro in La Plata and on October 25th they will return to the Tasso in Buenos Aires– He is already rehearsing the piece Landscapeby Harold Pinterand is preparing the cycle of concerts in Classical and Modern. “Oh! And I continue composing concert music, an activity that I had abandoned a few years ago and took up again during the pandemic,” he adds.
“For me, returning to Classical and Modern inevitably means remembering Anita Albarellosa wonderful person, who for almost thirty years was the programmer and press of a space that for many was a lovely refuge. That is why this cycle wants to be a tribute to her,” says Ramírez. “Remembering her is a way of thanking her for all she did for us. And when I say us, I mean Buenos Aires. Anita gave us a space in which each one of us could do what we wanted with total freedom and thus turned Clásica y Moderna into an emblematic place, a meeting point where as protagonists or guests we could be Mercedes (Sosa), Tana Rinaldi, Horacio Molina, Sandro, Mariquena Monti or Virgilio Espositoto name a few. There I met José Sacristán, with whom I later worked, and at a private event I heard Liza Minelli sing. It was also a place predisposed towards the world of culture, because it was closely linked to painters and writers,” recalls the pianist.
The cycles in which Ramírez presented his records, or those he did with Rita Cortese or with the legendary Puerto Rican singer Lucecita Benítez, are also part of a memory of Clásica y Moderna that has been revived since Friday in the intimate format that the atmosphere suggests. “I will be with Tato Taján on guitar and a guest every night,” Ramírez anticipates and reveals that he will welcome, among others, Bruno Arias and Charo Bogarín. “Surely we will go beyond the presentation of Argentine plan and we will do things from my other albums, like Ramírez x Ramírez, WeWe and others. In addition, each night the guest will surely leave his mark on the repertoire. I thought it would be good to revive the piano and guitar format, with guest artists, which I started with back in the 1990s at the Café Mozart and continued with for many years,” recalls the musician and theatre artist.
Son of one of the emblematic names of folklore, Ramírez trained in classical music from childhood. His sister Laura, Lyl Tiempo, Ana Tosi De Gelber and Antonio de Raco were his piano teachers and he studied composition with Guillermo Graetzar, before perfecting his skills in Vienna and Paris. At the same time as his music was growing, his vocation for theatre was maturing, a field in which his main teacher was Miguel Guerberof.
Far from giving in to the estrangement of being a musician in the theater and a theater person among musicians, Ramírez multiplies and manages to bring out the best in himself in the combination. “’You can tell you’re a musician when you do theater,’ he told me. Patricio Contreras Once he came to see me, when I staged Yellow by Carlos Somigliana. I felt it as a great compliment, because at the end of the day making popular music without being folklorist, composing concert music and doing theatre are part of the same sensibility,” continues Ramírez, who Last year he was awarded for his version of The maidsby Jean Genet.
“A few weeks ago, with Marcela Ferradas, we started rehearsing Landscapeby Harold Pinter, a work that I always wanted to do. I was able to buy the rights and now that I think about it, luckily I didn’t do it before, because only now do I feel mature enough to act and direct a text of extraordinary depth,” Ramírez reflects. “They are just two actors. A marriage in which the dialogue is exhausted to make room for monologues. Tremendous. Pinter is an author capable of creating a world that seems outside the world, but that suddenly reveals itself as the only possible one,” says the pianist and director. “It is a difficult, sad and beautiful work, which we are going to premiere in October at the Beckett Teatro (Guardia Vieja 3556), which was a theater that I opened as an actor, because it was programmed by my teacher, Miguel Guerberof, who staged two works by Samauel Beckett and I acted in one of them. This also represents a return in some way,” says Ramírez.
Everything seems to come together in Ramírez’s complex artistic plot, even the joint show with Julia Zenko that finally came to fruition this season and is established as a meeting place. “Julia and I owed each other a joint show. We met when we were invited to those recitals that Mercedes (Sosa) gave at Luna Park in the 90s and since then we always thought about doing something together. She was invited to Tell it to me in my eara tango cabaret that we did with Mario Figueiras, and then we shared a tour Maria from Buenos Aires “through Europe, with the production by Philippe Arlaud, in which she was María and I was the Duende,” Ramírez recalls and concludes: “But only now the planets have arranged themselves so that we can meet. And it is good that this happens in maturity, because better than knowing each other, we intuit each other wonderfully well in the back and forth of the song.”