Mireia Vendrell del Álamo (*1986 in Barcelona) has lived and worked in Bremen since 2012. At the core of her artistic work are improvisation, contemporary music, and the connection between notated and free sound creation. Her musical language is rooted in the musical gestures she has developed through years of engagement with the classical and contemporary piano repertoire. It opens up sonic spaces that intersect with minimal music, jazz, and contemporary classical music. Contrasting musical motifs coexist, creating polyphonies of timbre and texture. In doing so, she employs extended piano techniques alongside other compositional and sonic devices characteristic of twentieth- and twenty-first-century piano music. The resulting structures unfold as large-scale forms in which the musical trajectory is shaped by the development of sonic parameters and the density of layered textures, with gradual transitions between distinct sound worlds. Her music emerges from an improvisational engagement with the instrument. It is documented in a notation system intelligible only to herself, and each performance or iteration takes on a new form.

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Mireia Vendrell studied piano in Barcelona and Valencia, as well as at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts, where she completed a Master’s degree with a focus on contemporary music. She also earned a Master’s degree in Music Education at ESMUC (Barcelona College of Music). Among her most influential teachers are Luca Chiantore, Nicolas Hodges, Josep Maria Colom, Jordi Camell, Ramon Coll, and the Cuarteto Casals.

 

As a pianist, she has participated in numerous world premieres for solo piano and ensemble. She is a founding member of Ensemble New Babylon in Bremen, with whom she also curates and develops concert projects, and has been pianist of CrossingLines Ensemble Barcelona since 2010. Concert tours have taken her to festivals and concert halls throughout many European countries, as well as to Indonesia, South Korea, and Argentina. Alongside the piano, she is deeply engaged with other keyboard instruments such as harpsichord, toy piano, Hammond organ, and electronic keyboards, for which she develops her own concert and improvisation projects.

 

She appears on several CD productions, including releases on the labels D+3, Starfish Music, and NAXOS. Her concerts have been broadcast by BBC (UK), Radio Bremen, Hessischer Rundfunk, Deutschlandfunk Kultur (Germany), as well as COMRadio and Catalunya Música (Spain).

Another important focus of her work is music education. She teaches at the Bremen Music School and at the Nienburg Music School, where she heads the keyboard instruments department.