Ana Alcaide is performing at the MoonJune Festival Toledo on September 30, 2023.
Ana Alcaide is a Spanish performer, composer and music producer. She began her musical studies with the violin at the age of seven. She studied at the Getafe Conservatory (Madrid) and later at the University of Lund, Sweden.
Thanks to a Biology scholarship, in the year 2000 she Ana she traveled to Sweden and got to know the nyckelharpa or keyboard viola, a traditional Swedish instrument. Attracted by its sophistication and sonic depth, she began to play it self-taught in the city of Toledo, far from its original tradition. Years later, in 2005, she moved to Sweden to further her musical studies and specialize in this instrument. During this period she also received influences from other musical traditions, beginning to study new instruments and her own voice. He obtained a diploma at the Malmö Academy of Music following an individualized study plan (Individual Project) in which he oriented his career towards world music, combining his interest in traditional music with learning more modern techniques that have allowed him to create his own journey as a performer and composer.
As a result of her personal search and experimentation with the instrument, she published ‘Viola de teclas’ in 2006, a work that marks the beginning of her musical career and that made her a pioneer in the use and dissemination of the nyckelharp in Spain. His second work, ‘Como la luna y el sol’ (2007/2008), was the result of his final project of his career and offers his particular vision of the ancient Sephardic tradition. At the end of 2009 he compiled his first three years working on the DVD ‘Ana Alcaide en concierto’, recorded at the Synagogue of El Tránsito in Toledo. In 2012 he published his third album, ‘La cantiga del fuego’, his most emblematic work for being inspired by the city of Toledo and its Sephardic past, specifically, by some of its best-known legends such as the ‘Pozo amargo’ or the legend of ‘The keys of Toledo’.
In 2015 she starts a new line of work ‘Tales of Pangea’. Ana fuses her music with Indonesian melodies, resulting in her most exotic work, ‘Gotrasawala (Tales of Pangea)’
In 2022, and continuing this new line of multicultural work, she publishes ‘Ritual’. It was born from her personal encounter with the Iranian musician Reza Shayesteh and with Persian poetry. It is an ambitious musical and stage project that brings together artists from Iran, the United States and Spain. A mystical journey, a song to the power of connection through daily ritual actions, which is transformed into a live performance where music, poetry, dance and video projections come together to create a unique sensory spectacle.
Ana Alcaide has performed over 500 concerts worldwide non all continents.