Canarias awards the Canarias Award to three women: Rosario Álvarez, Dolores Corbella and María Isabel Nazco | Radio Club Tenerife | Hour 25 Canary Islands

Rosario Alvarez Martinez

His work had already been recognized, among other awards, with the award of the Gold Medal of the Canary Islands in 2005. But the work of Rosario Álvarez Martínez is so remarkable and essential to know the history of music in the Canary Islands that, in this edition, the members of the jury of the Canary Islands Historical Heritage Awards have not doubted it and have proposed, unanimously, to the President of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, that this very high distinction be granted to this Professor of Music History at the University of La Laguna (ULL).

Some of his research revolves around the rescue from oblivion to 132 composers of the Islands, in an investigation that involved not only making more than half of them known in the Dictionary of Spanish and Hispano-American Music, but also recording more than 500 works of them on the 56 discs that comprise the collection Musical creation in the Canary Islands of the RALS project, an initiative he shared with the sadly late musicologist Lothar Siemens.

But, in addition, Rosario Álvarez has rescued and preserved the Archipelago’s musical heritage, creating music files both in the Institute of Canarian Studies as in the Provincial Historical Archive, at the same time that he disseminated these scores and his music in many concerts and some exhibitions. A job done with care and meticulousness, the same that since 1988 has led her to advise and manage the restoration of the Archipelago’s historic organs among those involved.

A research work in the organology of the Canary Islands that has constituted, as she herself has recognized, a great passion, but whose result has allowed the rescue and development of twenty-two historic organs in Tenerife, nine in Gran canaria and four in The Palm.

Dolores Corbella Diaz

To circumscribe the enormous work of Dolores Corbella exclusively to the – undoubtedly very important – line of investigation of the Spanish spoken and written in the Canary Islands would be a ‘bolada’ and even an ‘alilaya’.

The work of this woman from Tenerife, Professor of Romance Philology at the ULL since she was 37 years old, which today collects the 2021 Canary Islands Prize Research and Innovation, It encompasses not only the scientific study of that important part of the Canarian identity as a people that is our way of speaking. Dolores Corbella is also expert in language history, on differential lexicography and in translation and editing of texts on Atlantic expansion.

Hence, ‘lengthening’ in his publications, we find from research on the oldest loans from Portuguese to Spanish linked to the terminology of the sugar agroindustry and those cane seedlings that Columbus brought to America from our Archipelago, to the first linguistic contacts with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, including, of course, the many works he has written, directed or co-directed on the linguistic variety of Spanish in the Canary Islands, among which are the best dictionaries of our modality.

Is archaeologist of linguistics, memory and words has a broad curriculum in the field of teaching, in addition to being the main researcher of many national and regional projects and a collaborator of such important works as the New Historical Dictionary of Spanish; the Exemplified Dictionary of Canarisms; the Differential dictionary or the mentioned Lexicographical Treasurer, among others.

Maria Isabel Nazco Hernandez

Self-demand and nonconformity are, perhaps, the nouns that best define the Professor of Procedures and Pictorial Technique at the Faculty of Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna and the 2021 Canary Islands Award Fine Arts and Interpretation, the plastic artist Maria Isabel Nazco Hernandez.

I am born was born in The Plains of Aridane, on the island of The Palm, where she is from Favorite Daughter. And although the color palette of his island and the volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands has been present in his life and in his long artistic career, the force from which his work draws has been, fundamentally, the desire for experimentation in pictorial creation, then, according to his words, “art without freedom is not art.”

That ethical and aesthetic commitment is distilled in his life and in his work.

It could already be seen in the first collective exhibition in which he participated, in 1957; or in his first solo show, at the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts in Tenerife, in 1969; and continues to be present today, because this multidisciplinary artist continues to explore materials and concepts with the same rebellion and passion that have always characterized her.

To their eighty three years old, the artist continues to be a benchmark of consistency and perseverance in the context of isCanarian artistic dinner, since his has been one of the most far-reaching artistic adventures of his generation, not only because of the originality of his proposals, but also because of the important reception that the decidedly experimental nature of his proposals reached in Spanish critics.

Likewise, Maribel Nazco was part of that important generation of Canarian artists, writers and intellectuals who developed a dynamic cultural activity in the sixties of the 20th century under the name of Our Art. The common interest of all of them was cultural renewal within the framework of the possibilities and significance of abstract art, although artists of very different styles participated in the group. In his case, passion and rupture coexist with a heartbreaking, singular and own honesty.

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