Stipendiemotivering:
Mercedes Bravo Cabanes är en ovanligt stor pianistbegåvning. Hennes spel kännetecknas av stort tekniskt kunnande och elegans. Allt i kombination med varm musikalitet och uttryckskraft.
Mercedes är även en aktiv kammarmusiker med många projekt i olika ensemblekombinationer. Med sina kvalitéer under fortsatta masterstudier har hon stora förutsättningar för utveckling in i ett professionellt musikliv.
From the moment I have memory there has always been a tingling inside my head that has prompted me to wonder and learn new things, to try to deeply understand what is around but, over all, to connect all these parcels of knowledge within my reach.
Apart from piano, my most enriching schools along these years have been, in one hand, travelling:
The nature, being in open air, reaching new places away from the routine and on my own foot, if posible, make my soul wider; but what truely open the mind is the fact of finding oneself in different contexts and trying to understand them, talking to different people that come from far places and sometimes also from far times, following other traditions…
In the other hand, my love for the literature, especially the poetry, the magic realism and the philosophy. They show the very thin line that sometimes separates the racional, the physical and the spiritual fields.
But the knowledge doesn’t stay there, as if the head was and old shelf nobody looks at. The ideas are starting points from which we must creat.
I firmly believe in the imagination. Not only as safe, fantastic garden through which one can move inside oneself but also as actual prime mover. The imagination is the first filter that can be applied to reality, not as distortion but as balsam or possibility before things are changed.
Almost by instint I write and I enjoy more and more playing with singers, when one works always with the texts. When I am given a score, what I like the most is diving in it, analysing it, reading about the aesthetic of the time or about what the composer could have had in mind…then, trying to connect all that with my own imaginary. These hours of practice and reflection on the interpretation are my favourite part of the pianistic career.
My purpose with the piano is to communicate, and maybe due to that obsession with creating links I also see the connecting potential of music. I would like to link different works of art with each other and with the ideas that they enclosure (sometimes very concrete and sometimes less precise) and send them to the audience so I can help in the comprehension, spread reflections, sow dialog.
Everything can be told in an aesthetic way, in a different way, that opens a door to somewhere and makes us think. There is where the true beauty resides.