Mercedes Gancedo, Ferran Bardolet and Pedro Pardo come to LIFE Victoria with a recital exploring the exile and legacy of Conxita Badia.
Barcelona, 21 October 2026
Next Friday, 23 October at 8 pm, at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site, LIFE Victoria presents a recital closely connected to exile, the central theme of the season. The programme resonates with the legacy of one of the key figures in Catalan song: Conxita Badia and her relationship with Victoria de los Ángeles.
Exiled after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the singer kept the language and the country’s musical repertoire alive on the other side of the Atlantic. Her approach to singing was deeply rooted in poetry and the expressive power of words, leaving a lasting mark on subsequent generations. Victoria de los Ángeles carried this legacy forward and brought it to major international stages, sharing works by Enric Granados, Pau Casals and Eduard Toldrà with Conxita.
On this occasion, soprano Mercedes Gancedo, cellist Ferran Bardolet, and composer and conductor Pedro Pardo will perform a programme that establishes a dialogue between this musical heritage and contemporary creation, featuring works by Enric Granados, Pau Casals, Ernesto Halffter, Joseph Canteloube, Reynaldo Hahn, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Pedro Pardo himself, including a song cycle set to poems written by Victoria de los Ángeles.
Both Mercedes Gancedo and Pedro Pardo have a special connection with the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation. The soprano studied for the Master’s Degree in Lied Victòria dels Àngels at ESMUC and has been a LIFE New Artist and a regular guest of the series. Pardo, meanwhile, is the conductor of the Victoria de los Ángeles Symphony Orchestra and has been one of the key artists featured in various LIFE Victoria seasons.
Daniel Bertomeu, a Pianistic Revelation
On the same Friday, 23 October, at 7 pm, as part of the Alicia de Larrocha Piano Series at LIFE Victoria, young pianist Daniel Bertomeu (17) explores three ways of understanding the distance of exile: travel as discovery, memory as refuge, and loss as transformation.
He does so through works by Franz Liszt, Frederic Mompou and Sergei Rachmaninoff. In Après une lecture** de Dante, Liszt** transforms pilgrimage into a spiritual experience that transcends physical displacement. Frederic Mompou’s Scènes d’enfants evoke childhood through the delicate lens of memory, as if time itself were also a form of exile. Finally, Rachmaninoff’s Second Sonata unfolds a world of extraordinary intensity, permeated by nostalgia and the search for a voice of his own—a voice the composer retained even after being forced to leave his native Russia.
This piano journey marks Daniel Bertomeu’s debut at LIFE Victoria and promises to be one of the season’s revelations.
