XI Festival Xácara 2013 in Oviedo

Festival Banda de gaitas Xácara, Oviedo.

november16 th 2013

Each time we are invited to participate in some festival with other bagpipes bands we have the doubt about which kind of people will find, how they gonna treat us how they gonna receive us, etc that´s like a blind date.

So far we have always felt very well treated bud in this last trip to Oviedo have been one of the best experience, very short in time but very satisfactory. The treatement received will be hardly enhanced.

The attention received from the organizers has been impeccable. Also there was no language barrier as has happened in other festivals abroad.
Xácara, the bagpipe band from Asturias, winner of the last bagpipe bands contest of the Asturias principality, has been the organizer of this festival the XI of his history. Each year they organizea concert where they invite to other bands an participants. They to it like the end of the season of bagpipe performances.
The Concert have been in the Teatro de la Filarmónica de Oviedo. The participants were the Banda de Gaitas Lakadarma, from Navia. The Xeremiers de Sóller, from Mallorca. The duo Alberto Jambrina and Pablo Madrid, from Zamora and the hosts Banda de Gaitas Xácara, from Oviedo.

 The concert began at 19.30 h. and finished at 22.00 h. The theater was full of audience and the public enjoyed a lot of our performance, surpriced by our clothes and our songs. Uused to the Asturian bagpipe the morphologie of our bagpipe was a surprise.

The night finish with a dinner with all the participants in a tipic restaurant a "Llagar" a cider factory and restaurant where the cider "sidra" runs freely.
One of the best moments was when the Xeremiers de Sóller plus two members of the Xácara group played the "l´estecheiru" song, a gig from the Xácara band repertoire, great moment.

The two members of Xácara were the musical director and a main member of the gorup, they commented that the Xeremia is heaviest than the Gaita and a little bit difficult to play but they love the combination of Xeremia with the flabiol (traditional mallorca flute) and tamborino (littel drum).


There have been another detail that surprise them from our band, it was the amount of festivals we did abroad, in Italy, Turkey, Germany, Scottland
in fact they decided to invite us when they saw we participated three times at the Piping live in Glasgow.

Apart from the musical activity, the organizers like tourist guides invited us to visit the mining museum "Museo de la industria Minera" at the El Entrego concello during the saturday morging. And during the sunday morning brought us to visit the historyc Oviedo, a member of his band an history student gave us all the explanations at the main historic spots of the city, was really interesting and we enjoy it a lot.

The final act of our visit was a tipical lunch in a prestigius restaurant of the city.

We felt that our blind date has been a complet success.

Andreu Magraner Brunet.
President
XEREMIERS DE SÓLLER