The Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert has been a must for music lovers for decades. But the people of Tenerife should not go so far to enjoy a concert on January 1st. Garachico and Arafo were two of the municipalities that offered a musical evening yesterday.
For years, Tenerife adds to the tradition of receiving the New Year with music. After a long night of partying and given the inactivity on January 1st, there is no better plan than to spend the afternoon listening to professionals from the art world, who carefully prepare this first performance and who receive the love of an audience with each new edition. dedicated to such a cultural activity to start every January. In Tenerife –which year after year continues the path of large European cities that organize concerts on this day, such as Vienna–, the New Year’s concerts in Garachico and Arafo are two of the most outstanding on the agenda for this January 1st, and this year they returned with force after the break or the modifications of the last two editions due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Garachico New Year’s Concert was the first to begin yesterday afternoon, starting at 6:00 p.m. in a crowded roundabout in San Francisco. The Big Band of Canary Islands, led by Kike Perdomo, returned in this eighth edition after the break of the last two years due to the health crisis and for this reason the evening was free and without limited capacity. The jazz group was accompanied on this occasion by the Cuban Zule Guerra and the Lithuanian Viktorija Pilatovic as a guest artist and all of them kicked off the cultural year in Garachico.
During the afternoon, the singer and songwriter Zule Guerra presented some of the songs from her latest album, El viaje, which she covered with Kike Perdomo’s group. Influenced by Afro-American and Latino rhythms, Guerra showed that she is not afraid of improvisation and that the important thing is to have a good time on stage. The Lithuanian jazz singer and composer, Viktorija Pilatovic also showed her great mastery of this musical genre after going through festivals such as the Jazzaldia de Donostia-San Sebastián, Valencia Jazz Festival, Formentera Jazz Festival, Sevilla Jazz Festival, Grenoble Metropole Jazz, and many others in Spain and Europe.
Both groups had guest artists, both from the Canary Islands and from the rest of the world
For his part, the Musical Artistic Association (AAM) La Candelaria de Arafo returned to normality with its traditional New Year’s concert, which was held at the Auditorio de la Villa from eight thirty in the evening. To celebrate this new year and the end of all kinds of restrictions, the group was accompanied on stage for the first time by Ballets de Tenerife and the International Dance Center of Tenerife, and the Polyphonic Choir of the University of La Laguna (ULL).
The AAM La Candelaria returned to the more traditional sound of Christmas and performed songs such as some pieces from El lago de los cisnes, in which they were accompanied by the talent of the Tenerife dancers, who delighted the audience gathered there. Likewise, the group took advantage of the presence of the ULL Polyphonic Choir to interpret Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, a piece that it had shown before but for the first time included the voices of this group.
In this way, the island talent filled Tenerife with music again on January 1, where culture becomes a perfect activity with which to start the new year and which for many has become an unmissable event.