Shortly after completing his studies at the Royal College of Music in London in 1933, Benjamin Britten was commissioned by his brother Robert, a teacher at a children's school in Wales, to compose a work for children's choir and piano for his singing classes, which were held on Friday afternoons.

This led to the creation of the song cycle Friday Afternoons , and to a connection with the world of childhood that Britten would maintain throughout his life, as his catalog demonstrates. The texts of the cycle, drawn from diverse sources—from traditional nursery rhymes to poems by authors such as Walter de la Mare—showcase the ability of a Britten, barely 20 years old, to combine different moods—humorous, lyrical, or contemplative—in short pieces. The version presented in this concert is an arrangement for string orchestra and children's choir.

Seventy years ago, one of the most emblematic and influential works of electroacoustic music was first performed: Karlheinz Stockhausen's The Song of the Adolescents . Composed between 1955 and 1956, it combines a child's voice—recorded at different pitches and timbres—with electronic sounds generated in the studio. During those years, Stockhausen conceived the idea of ​​writing a piece of music in which the text itself would be treated as a new musical scale: on the one hand, the pure and comprehensible text; on the other, transformed into a sonic element, to the point of unintelligibility. The title refers to the young protagonists of the biblical texts used, as the work was intended as the closing piece of a kind of electronic mass. The Song of the Adolescents anticipated many of the techniques that would later define electroacoustic music and sound art.

“We are working in one of the most beautiful corners, in one of the most enchanting atmospheres in the world,” wrote playwright María Lejárraga to Manuel de Falla in 1915, during the creation of El Amor Brujo ( Love, the Magician). The partnership between the Martínez Sierra couple and Manuel de Falla has been one of the most fruitful artistic collaborations in the history of Spanish music. The close friendship that arose between them resulted in librettos perfectly suited to Falla's artistic tastes and interests, allowing him to work and experiment with genres he had not previously explored, and which brought about a renewal in the Spanish dramatic-musical scene of the time.

The best example of this is El Amor Brujo , a gypsy opera in two acts that marked a new era, both in Falla's compositional style and in the Spanish musical scene. This program presents the work in its original 1915 version, with the participation of the flamenco singer and multidisciplinary artist Niño de Elche, one of the most interesting figures on the contemporary music scene.