Jardí tancat
Ariola, 1981
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During 1980 she toured Galicia and the rest of the Spanish State. She also took part in several festivals in Corti (Corsica), Frankfurt, in the Festival Folk 80 and in Cologne, being the first time she had visited Germany.
1980 was also the year in which she recorded the record Jardí Tancat which represented a turning point in her career. The recording was done in the Moraleda studios in Barcelona and the Fremontel studios in Normandy, where a long list of musicians took part with whom she had already worked such as Albert Moraleda and Jordi Sabatés and French musicians with the artistic direction of Maria del Mar Bonet and Lautaro Rosas. Also on this record is the collaboration of the Breton harpist Alain Stivel who after hearing Maria del Mar Bonet sing Cançó de Na Ruixa Mantells, which he fell in love with, at a concert in Madrid he suggested his collaboration when she recorded it. Also of note on this record is the first collaboration with the Aragon musician Javier Mas who would stay by her side until 2007. It should be pointed out that Alain Stivel played the Celtic harp on the record.
The record is dedicated to the poets of the Mallorca school, and their selection is described by Carme Riera in the presentation: Maria del Mar Bonet has chosen with care from the leading figures of Mallorcan poetry following an aesthetic and subjective criteria – the poems that she likes – and musical – the possibilities of being sung. These poets are Miquel Costa i Llobera, Joan Alcover, Miquel dels Sants Oliver, Gabriel Alomar, Maria Antònia Salvà and Llorenç Riber. To make this selection Maria del Mar mentioned the help she had from Damià Huguet and Toni Catany.
Songs such as La Balanguera, Cançó de Na Ruixa Mantells, El Pi de Formentor, to highlight a few if one can on such a complete album, became classics of her repertoire.
In the summer of 1980 she sang again in the Plaça del Rei in Barcelona with a repertoire that included songs by troubadours and songs by Mallorcan romantic poets, poetic material that would form her next two albums. In November of that year she gave four recitals in the new Cultural Centre of Terrassa sharing the stage with the flamenco guitarist Manolo Sanlúcar.
In January 1981 the concert in the Auditorium de Palma, which was by now a traditional event, she once again filled the venue. In March she performed in Paris for UNESCO; in May in the Teatro Salamanca in Madrid and in Cerdenya.
On the 29th of June 1981 she began her series of concerts in the Plaça del Rei, which began to be seen as a tradition by the Barcelona public, where she presented her record Jardí tancat with Lautaro Rosas and Javier Mas and a great reception by both the public and the critics.
Arising from the idea of Àngel Casas of playing with the musicians she liked the most for the television programme Musical Express, she made contact with the Tunisian musicians she had met previously in Marseille, the Ensemble de Musique Traditionelle de Tunis, led by Fethi Zghonda. She travelled to Tunisia to record the programme and gave a concert there. It was clear, then, that the interest that Maria del Mar Bonet had in Mediterranean music crossed geographic and linguistic frontiers and which until then had been a look towards the other shore now became the beginning of a long musical and poetic dialogue.
