Although since childhood she felt an irrepressible attraction to the stage and the world of entertainment, reaching it has not been an easy task for the soprano Nuria Esquius. As often happens, his family advised him to study for a career with a future in case his dream went awry. Determined to have solid foundations on which to lean, Esquius studied Architecture, a career that she combined as best she could with her singing classes and rehearsals in the faculty choir. “You don’t live on music”, they told him at home to the interpreter who today can both build houses and sing cuplés. She does it (singing couplets, building houses takes longer) every Saturday and Sunday this month at the Teatre Gaudí Barcelona with ‘La cupletista’a filmed show, directed by Pere Sagristà, which dives into the golden age of Paral·lel in the 1920s based on the figure of Càndida Pérez Martínez (Olot, 1893-1989).
Cándida was a crack who, apart from singing cuplés, also composed them. In the Esquius show she performs several accompanied by Eladi Dalmau on piano, including some of the most famous such as ‘La Marieta de l’ull viu’ and ‘Les Caramelles’. “We have to vindicate Càndida Pérez. At that time it was unusual for a woman to compose her own songs”, comments the artist. Pérez formed a good tandem with her husband, the Neapolitan musician Melquíadez Lucarelli. “She was very good at creating melodies and he was in charge of the arrangements.” Together they toured Europe and South America, where she left him. She retired in 1932 after meeting a wealthy Brazilian industrialist who became her second husband.
It is a pity that young people do not know the cuplé, it is an ingenious music that is part of our history
Esquius is fascinated by the picaresque and humor of Pérez’s cuplés, although not all the pieces have his lyrics. “It’s a pity that young people don’t know cuplé, it’s ingenious music that is part of our history,” she says. Of course, nothing to do with the subtlety of the double meanings of some ‘hits’ of that time with some current songs.
artistic contagion
Infected by the adventurous spirit of Cándida Pérez, Esquius, beyond singing and acting, also began to compose his own songs. She intersperses some of them in ‘Moments’, a theatrical concert based on musical theater classics where she performs from passages from ‘Flor de nit’ to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’. “It is a personal satisfaction to discover this facet. For now I have about four or five with arrangements by Jorge Varela,” says Esquius, a singer with a light soprano tessitura who dreamed of being an opera singer. In her early days she worked in the Amics de l’Òpera de Sabadell choir and she even played a solo role in the operetta ‘Mr. Choufleurie restera chez lui le…’, by Offenbach. It was precisely there that Pere Sagristà discovered it, who set his sights on it to stage ‘La cupletista’, whose first version – now improved – premiered in 2004. “When we staged it for the first time there was a ‘boom’ in construction and I worked during the day in the office in Montroig del Camp, where I live, and at night I was in Barcelona all dressed up and singing in the now-defunct Artenbrut”, she remembers. Shortly after, she got the opportunity to play the role of Saïd’s mother in the famous musical ‘Mar i cel’ by Dagoll Dagoll, in 2005.
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“I opted for the musical because the competition in the world of opera is brutal,” he admits. “Sometimes I think that if I had been more confident when I was young, things would have been different,” she confesses. “As a child I always imagined myself in a very high place and people looking at me. The stage is my home!”. Her architecture has served her to design the sets for her shows, “which I have always set up myself,” she says proudly. And to raise buildings, of course. “Designing a house is easy if the client knows what he wants, but if he doesn’t have clear ideas, it’s a mess.”
Right now it’s on his mind to put on a show with other actors. “I have concerns and I want to continue moving forward. Now I am focused on the world of entertainment, which I like the most, and I have many ideas.”