The digital platform of the Castell de Peralada Festival
The digital platform that will house the documentary collection of the Castell de Peralada Festival was presented at Peralada Castle Library . With this action, the Castell de Peralada Foundation lays the first stone of what will be its future digitised archive. The platform, created to conserve, modernise and popularise the documentary collection of images, posters and other documents of the Castell de Peralada Festival, is the result of collaboration with the Cellnex Foundation.
The digital platform facilitates accessibility to the documentary collection available to the public over the Internet. Outstanding among the digitised images and documents that will be available for consultation are the photographs and slides of great moments in the history of performing arts in our country, seen through the lens of professional photographers who have worked or continue to work on it, the artists who have taken part and the documents that have been published over the years.
The digital transformation of the archive of the Castell de Peralada Festival will take place in various phases, since it is a living archive that is constantly being updated, until everyone can access all the images, posters and editorial documents with a single click. The project will end in 2026 to mark the 40th anniversary of the musical contest and will promote the digital transformation of this documentary collection, comprising over 50,000 searchable files, including photographs, illustrations and other documents. So far, 11,000 photographic slides have been digitised. They concern moments from the Castell de Peralada Festival and the musical galas organised by Casinos de Catalunya between 1982 and 1992. The vast majority of the digitised photographs were taken by the photographer Josep Aznar, who died in 2017. Approximately 6,000 negatives by the same photographer are also currently being digitised, and come from the archive of the MAE, Documentation Centre and Museum of Performing Arts, where the entire Josep Aznar photographic collection is located. The first phase of the project will comprise a documentary collection of 21,000 images that will be available before the year's end.
Furthermore, the platform will offer virtual exhibitions as a way to popularise the archive itself. The holding of photographic and archival document exhibitions and exhibitions of artists linked to the festival based on a particular theme, with a user-friendly format, will allow everyone to discover the wealth of this documentary collection. The platform is currently showing an exhibition entitled "30 years of dance in Peralada" by Josep Aznar. This exhibition includes 42 photographs by the Catalan photographer that show the most representative shows, companies, choreographers and dancers that have performed on the Peralada stage over the first 30 years. The exhibition opened at the Palau Robert in Barcelona in 2014 and later travelled to the Citadel in Roses, the Comú de Andorra La Vella and the Espai Catalunya-Europa in Brussels.
All the key national and international figures from the world of music, dance and artistic creation have appeared on the Peralada stage, such as Montserrat Caballé, Plácido Domingo, Jaume Aragall, Victória de los Ángeles, among many others, as well as Rudolf Nureyev, Maya Plisetskaya, Mstislav Rostropovich, Roland Petit, Maurice Béjart, Sylvie Guillem, and many more. The archive treasures outstanding moments in the history of performing arts such as Calixto Bieto's Carmen, which caused controversy at the time, but is still alive today more than 20 years after its première at the Festival, or unforgettable musical moments such as the return to the stage of Josep Carreras in a recital he gave around the world after overcoming leukaemia, or the world première of the opera Babel 46 by the composer Xavier Montsalvatge.
Thanks to the support of the Cellnex Foundation and the use of technology, it will be easier to access the cultural and historical wealth of the festival, recognised for its excellence, tradition, avant-garde and innovation, guaranteeing that future generations can also enjoy it, while highlighting the commitment that this festival has always had to culture.