María Parra Peñafiel

If we do not desire the impossible, we do not desire or we have stopped desiring. Antonio Porchia

In a world devoted to saleability of everything, of life, of beings and also of art, rare are the artists who are strong, courageous and willing enough to embody a form of resistance against the darkening of the spirits.

María Parra Peñafiel is a pianist but she is more than that. For her, as for some others of the same creed, music is not a means of social promotion. Nor is it a market share on which to achieve a return or even an enjoyable pastime. Music is life itself freed from all burden. Music is the reason (or the unreason) for living of this artist who, through the tips of her fingers, acknowledges a true and beautiful existence which, in short, no real artist can escape.

What is the point of a biography if it consists of congratulation or reassurance? María Parra Peñafiel, Castilian by birth and soul, was a student in Vilaseca and Tarragona Conservatoire, where she attained full honours.

She developed in Paris with Jacques Rouvier and Prisca Benoit successively and perfected her achievement with Alicia de Larrocha, as the only spanish woman who obtained ,with her signature in her own handwriting, the "Máster de Música Española'.

There is no need to say more. María Parra Peñafiel, an essential artist who claims nothing but to be listened to.Carefully selecting her performances, María Parra Peñafiel has chosen a difficult path of pianistic rigour and uprightness: music as ascesis. But it is true that great adventures of spirit and art are always conceived in the eternal contradiction between the creator's solitude and their necessary devotion to the other, to others. María Parra Peñafiel, praise for the music in its true essence.