Mercedes Peón, Uxía, Javier Ruibal, Xoel López and Malú headline the lineup for the 5th Sounds in Nature Festival, SoNna Huesca
A large number of mayors from across the province and members of the media attended the presentation of the fifth edition of the SoNna Huesca Festival , which generated considerable excitement. The festival will tour the ten districts of the Alto Aragón region between June 29 and September 14. Galician singer Mercedes Peón will open the festival at the CDAN in Huesca, and Madrid native Malú will close it at the Cartuja de las Fuentes in Sariñena.
The Model Room of the Provincial Council of Huesca hosted this morning the presentation of the fifth edition of the Sounds in Nature Festival, SoNna Huesca, which through a total of 27 shows, will tour the ten districts of Alto Aragón between June 29 and September 14 with a program mainly musical, but with room for theater and circus.
The event generated considerable interest, with a large media presence and nearly twenty mayors in attendance, including the mayor of the capital, Lorena Orduna, the mayor of Barbastro, Fernando Torres, and the mayor of Sariñena, Francisco Villellas. The event was presided over by the Deputy for Culture and mayor of Grañén, Carlos Sampériz.
“We’re finally opening the festival chapter of the Huesca Provincial Council, and in doing so, we can officially inaugurate summer here. Music is our main ally, but as you know, the land itself is too,” said Carlos Sámperiz in a brief address that led into the program video, featuring the selected artists and venues. “Most of the shows and productions at SoNna Huesca don’t even have a stage, in order to minimize our impact on the natural spaces,” the Provincial Council’s Culture Deputy emphasized.
The festival, which since its creation in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic has focused on small-scale events and natural settings, this year discovers locations – 40% of which are new – for the meeting of art and nature, such as the village of Cardiel (Fraga), where some thirty Spaghetti Westerns were filmed in the 1960s ; the hermitage of Nuestra Señora de la Ganza in Calasanz, the Centenera Mill (Graus), the Laus and Valonga wineries, as examples of the humanized agricultural landscape; the Sanctuary of San Urbez de Nocito, the Fountain of Memories of Fraella (Grañén) or the Milano Real-Cometa Roja Museum of Binaced join this year other spaces already visited by the festival in its four previous editions.
“Nature itself provides the finishing touch: under a large holm oak or on the spur of a reservoir, with the sunset in the background. The Sounds in Nature Festival creates a very special atmosphere. Here, the venues are as important as the program,” summarized Sampériz, who then introduced Begoña Puértolas, Culture Officer for the Provincial Council of Huesca (DPH), who, along with Luis Calvo, is in charge of organizing the event.
As Puértolas explained, the opening of the fifth edition will take place, as is tradition, at the Center for Art and Nature (CDAN) in Huesca on June 29th, led by Galician artist Mercedes Peón, “a truly unconventional artist.” The opening weekend is rounded out by the duo Uxía and Javier Ruibal with their performance * From Your House to Mine *, a meeting of Rosalía de Castro and Federico García Lorca, between the north and south of the Iberian Peninsula, at the Vicente Baldellou Space in Alquézar.
As is now customary, the festival will conclude in mid-September at the Cartuja Nuestra Señora de las Fuentes in Sariñena. This year, the headliners for the festival's only two ticketed concerts will be Galician singer Xoel López and Madrid-born Malú (September 13th and 14th). According to Begoña Puértolas, tickets for these concerts will go on sale on May 13th at 11:00 AM on the DPH website, www.dphuesca.es
Between June and September, the SoNna Huesca caravan will once again visit charming natural and heritage sites across the ten districts of Alto Aragón, aiming to bring high-quality culture to rural areas through a program that connects the region. “Traditional music is very much present in SoNna Huesca,” said Begoña Puértolas. “The program draws on many young people who are revitalizing this type of music, and in this sense, although we can't mention all the artists, it's a real privilege, for example, to have Queralt Lahoz performing in a place like the Sanctuary of San Urbez,” she added before outlining the program, which also includes styles such as jazz and experimental music.
The DPH festival will return, for example, to the Salinar de Naval to enjoy the Colombians Caribefunk (July 14), “who were Grammy nominees in 2022”; to the town of Susín (Biescas), “where in 2020 we saw many tears fall” to perform La lluvia amarilla again (July 15) or to the Carrasca de Larredán, in the Pueyo de Santa Cruz, “where it is incredible how 150 people take shelter under it”, to enjoy the Andalusian Musgö.
A total of 27 shows, mostly concerts of the most varied styles, for which it will be necessary to purchase an invitation ticket for a token price of 1 euro, except for the opening concert, which will have a price of 3€ and the Cartuja concerts, which will have an advance ticket price of 25€ and 30€.
The international participation of SoNna Huesca 2024 includes concerts by the Argentinian Soema Montenegro in Cardiel on July 7, the aforementioned Caribefunk concert in Naval; the performance by the Brazilian Anna Tréa in Llanos de Planduviar (Broto) on August 3, the concert by the Italian Daniela Pess in the Pineta valley on August 4, the Moroccan trio Aïta mon amour in the hermitage of San Medardo de Benabarre on August 9, the Trio da Kali (Mali) concert at the LAUS Winery on August 17, the French Mattieu Saglio Quartet on August 31 at Finca Valonga, “a space that we believe almost nobody knows and that once had a school” and the Portuguese Ana Lua Caiano concert on September 1 in the hermitage of San Bartolomé de Altorricón.
Other prominent names in this fifth edition of SoNna Huesca include Pedro Pastor from Madrid, Queralt Lahoz and Judith Nieddermann from Catalonia, Blanca Altable from Castile and León, and Ester Vallejo from Aragon. The Aragonese lineup is completed by the companies Corral de García ( The Yellow Rain ) and Lagartolagarto-Zazurca, which will perform Evil in the gardens of Casa Ric-Otal on July 27.
The image of SoNna Huesca, once again a hybrid between art and nature in the shape of a bird, is in this fifth edition the work of Diego Lizán from Murcia.
