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Working on Spanish repertoire –the music with which I started my career as a conductor– has helped me to understand the music of all cultures.

Tomas Luis de Victoria is a product of the Siglo de Oro (“The Golden Century”) when Spain was the dominant European nation, Philip II was the powerful Spanish king – and Victoria was Europe’s greatest composer.

The following program notes were originally written in Spanish on the occasion of a concert with the Córdoba Orchestra that took place on May 21, 1998.

It is generally known that in the 1920s and early ’30s, Spain’s cultural production was in a moment of extraordinary splendour; one might simply cite the names of García Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, or Picasso –all of whom were coming into artistic maturity in precisely these years-as evidence of this renaissance.

From his first adventure in Parade (1917) to his most committed in Mercure (1924), Picasso, fascinated since he was a child with the world of costume and spectacle –the circus and the bulls in the foreground– is going to live an idyll with the ballet.