The Festival de Música Contemporánea de Tenerife (FMUC) continues celebrating its tenth birthday by offering Translating, a concert by Agwal Percussion Group, that includes pieces by Ravel, Varèse, Stravinsky, Metheny and Francis Hernández, who is also conducting the concert to be performed with percussion instruments. It is taking place on Thursday, the 13 at 7:30 pm at Sala de Cámara in Auditorio de Tenerife. There is a pre-concert talk at 6:30 pm to inform about the background of the group and their music.

Agwal Percussion Group aims at highlighting the new role of current percussion by carrying out different programmes on contemporary music. At the turn of the 20th century social and artistic changes came about, including the liberalization of sound and the emancipation of percussion that went from being accompanying instruments to having a new role: percussion as a solo instrument.

This family of instruments faces new sound challenges by offering a huge range of texture and colour. Translating proposes a different approach to compositions that were originally written for other instruments and that are part of the 20th century repertoire.

This programme includes Ionisation, by Edgard Varèse, as an acknowledgement to the said emancipation as this was one of the first pieces that was purposefully composed for this family of instruments.

Tickets are available at Auditorio de Tenerife box office from 10:00 am to 7:30 pm, Monday to Saturday except holidays; on the website www.auditoriodetenerife.com  or calling 902 317 327.

The percussion ensemble was set up at the Tenerife base of Conservatorio Superior de Música de Canarias, their main goal is to show the specific percussion repertoire in Spain. The group is made up by all the percussion students of the conservatoire and conducted by their teacher Paco Díaz, director of FMUC.

In the last year, its current members have given countless concerts in different municipalities and cities in Tenerife, La Palma and Lanzarote, and in cities in mainland Spain like Madrid, Valencia, San Sebastián or Zaragoza.

They also play as quartets and have received several awards as for instance, the first prize at the Concurso de Música de Cámara María Orán and the first and second prize at the VI Concurso Internacional de Música de Cámara de Percusión en el Festival de Percute 2018 de Catarroja, Valencia. The ensemble has also premiered musical works like A través del espejo by Francisco Hernández, or Después del mar by Cecilia Díaz.

The members of the current group are Gabriel Díaz Santos, Miguel Pérez Valadés, Alberto Bercial Ruiz, Andrea Melián Alayón, Nelson Hernández López, Rocío González Romero, Álvaro Muñoz Triviño, Antonio Rodríguez Acosta, Marta Rosa Díaz, Vicent Venavent Estévez, Víctor Hugo Hernández Arencibia and Ian Piniés Ramirez.

Francis Hernández will be conducting the performance. Pianist and composer, Hernández is regarded to be an eclectic musician who has alternated teaching with composition and musical direction. He was born in La Orotava, where he started to study piano and trumpet to then go on to further his education at Conservatorio Superior de Música de Tenerife. In 1996 he attended an intensive course at Berklee College of Music and in 2014 he studied composition at Conservatorio Superior de Música de Canarias. He has been part of different jazz and popular music bands since the mid-1990s.

From 2004-2008 he worked as musical director for RTVE and Televisión Canaria. Since 2010 he has been part of different projects by producer Pablo Cebrián and has written music for animation series and short films and has also arranged and orchestrated different national productions. Between 2014-2018 he was the musical director at Auditorio de Tenerife of the musicales Jesucristo Superstar, Evita and Sunset Boulevard. In this last phase, he also conducted Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife in two concerts for Fiestas del Cristo de La Laguna (2016 and 2018).