A modern-day Rita Hayworth

There is an explanation for the odd scene unfolding on Madrid's Gran Vía. The soprano walking down the red carpet, looking just like Rita Hayworth in the 1946 movie Gilda, happens to be the first woman in the history of Madrid's Teatro Real to have premiered her own opera, Página en blanco. She is now standing on a stage, performing songs from movie soundtracks.

Pilar Jurado is an all-round artist - opera singer, composer and orchestra conductor - who is pretty much impossible to classify, given that some her work involves combinations of styles as diverse as Baroque and electronic music. Her career is equally remarkable: it started when she was just a child, right after watching the classic film Strangers in the Night.

"The music of the silver screen has become a soundtrack to my own life"

"The day after watching that movie, my mother caught me playing the theme song on the xylophone, although I'd had no previous musical training," she recalls. "She was so surprised that she asked me if I wanted to study music, and I said yes."

And that was the beginning of an unstoppable career that she sums up thus: "My life is magical: the universe comes together and the project that I always dreamed of comes true."

Pilar Jurado completed her voice studies in record time, from the ages of 13 to 20, while also taking classes in orchestral conducting. She was a student at the Royal Superior Conservatory of Music, while working as a teacher simultaneously, and even studied film music with Ennio Morricone - that might explain why one of the songs in the show to promote her new album, Una voz de cine, is the love theme from Cinema Paradiso, written by the master's son, Andrea Morricone.

"Ever since I was a child I've been fascinated by the silver screen, and in particular by the way that music implemented the emotional strength of the images. A lot of that music has become the soundtrack to my own life," says Jurado, who admits she had been thinking about this dual album-show project for a long time. Her immediate plans are to go on tour across Spain, then to Miami, New York and Tokyo, all places where she has already performed to great critical acclaim.

It has been two years of work in new musical territory, but her producer, Tony Carmona, seems to have provided her with the kind of musical environment where all possible genres have a place.

The album opens with the aforementioned love theme from Cinema Paradiso and continues with a cover of My Favorite Things from the movie The Sound of Music.

"The selection has a lot to do with my own personal experiences," she admits. Libertango (the famous Astor Piazzola composition, included in Roman Polanski's Frantic, starring Harrison Ford) is the most spectacular of the songs on the album, a version with accordion solos and an arrogant orchestration in which Jurado, following in the wake of Grace Jones and Nina Hagen, delivers a vocally challenging performance.

There is even a song suggested by the Spanish film director Fernando Trueba. "It's I Will Wait For You, one of his favorite songs, as he told me when I met him in Capri, and it's dedicated to him, with a very Latin touch." The theme belongs to Les parapluies de Cherbourg, a film from 1964 starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo.

"In all, it's almost two hours of music, moving straight from one genre to another," explains Jurado. "It's a very demanding show from a vocal standpoint, and that is why I can't perform it two days in a row."