We designed the 2026 season as a space for dialogue between history and imagination, where the popular and the erudite, tradition and artifice, heritage and reinvention coexist. Each program affirms music as a critical and poetic language, capable of engaging with the present without renouncing its complexity. In this way, we invite audiences to listen from a place of curiosity and wonder, understanding the concert as a deeply aesthetic and intellectual experience.
2026 Concert Series
Of Majos and Petimetres; Cosmopolitan Music from the Madrid Salon
Between courtly elegance and popular wit, Bourbon Madrid was a crucible of contrasts. In its salons, Italian grace, French sobriety, and Spanish temperament coexisted, shaping a profoundly cosmopolitan musical culture. Of Majos and Petimetres presents a space where Enlightenment refinement and vernacular spirit met during one of the most vibrant periods in Spanish musical history. The figure of the majo, symbol of popular pride and Madrid identity, stands in contrast to the petimetre, the Francophile aristocrat—cultured, refined, and enamored with foreign fashions. These two archetypes—one spontaneous and visceral, the other sophisticated and cosmopolitan—defined not only social customs but also the musical taste of a city opening itself to the world without renouncing its character. The music of the Madrid salon reflects precisely this dialogue between the local and the foreign, where Spanish dances merged with the French galant style and Italian models, creating a hybrid repertoire of great charm and subtlety.
Julián Navarro, conductor
The Bachs; A Family Portrait
The Bach family embodies, like no other, the idea of music as innovation, heritage, and thought. Across several generations, this dynasty shaped a craft that spans the late Baroque and anticipates new sensibilities, without ever losing its artisanal rigor or expressive depth. This program offers an intimate portrait of that familial constellation, where each composer asserts a distinct voice within a shared horizon. Johann Bernhard brings the clarity and majesty of the French style; Wilhelm Friedemann astonishes with his untamed imagination and experimental character; Carl Philipp Emanuel unfolds a rhetoric charged with emotional intensity; and Johann Sebastian distills an aesthetic synthesis whose relevance transcends time and style. More than a genealogy, this program reveals a way of thinking about music as a continuous practice—transmitted, questioned, and transformed.
Guillermo Salas, conductor
Once Upon a Time; A Musical Theater of Illusion and Fantasy
Between theatrical artifice and boundless imagination, the Baroque constructed a universe in which music became the language of the improbable. Within it, battles, storms, talking animals, and chivalric heroes came to life through sound, inviting the listener into a game of illusion and wonder. This program transports us to that stage, where affects and images are transformed into sonic narratives, revealing the ingenuity with which Baroque composers gave voice to imagination. The narrative spirit of the Baroque drew upon astonishment, the desire to transform reality through artifice, and the exploration—through sound—of the limits of the possible. Once Upon a Time proposes listening to music as storytelling, as a mirror of human imagination that traverses time and style, revealing a shared sensitivity to dream, humor, passion, and mystery.
Sarah Cranor, conductor
In Terra – In Caelo; Counterpoints of Flesh and Spirit
At the heart of human experience pulses a universal tension: shadow and light, body and soul, the earthly and the divine, the ephemeral and the eternal. In Terra – In Caelo is a musical meditation that confronts these dualities; a reflection of the struggle that defines our humanity and its constant yearning for transcendence.
In Terra casts us into the shadows of earthly life, where the paradoxes of existence emerge as a mirror of our fragility. Here, the drama of Rinaldo—the knight from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered—intertwines with the intense dialogues between Soul and Body. In a musical chiaroscuro, passions and conflicts, imbued with doubt and desire, unfold in a sonic tapestry where the divine and the human confront and coexist. Rinaldo, torn between love and duty, embodies the turmoil of the Body, trapped in a world as contradictory as it is dazzling.
In Caelo, by contrast, lifts the gaze toward eternal light. Verses from the Song of Songs and the Psalms of King David resonate in harmonies that shine like stars in the darkness, evoking the fullness of divine love. There, the human voice becomes a ray of light in search of the sublime, inviting the Soul to transcend the mundane and rest in celestial harmony.
And so, between Earth and Heaven, we are invited to listen to the inner struggle between the whisper of the Soul and the anguished cry of the Body, confronting us with the essential mystery of our own existence. After all, can light be conceived without shadow?
David Esteban Escobar, conductor
Jarabí; Memories of Africa in the Iberian Baroque
This program offers a scenic and musical journey through the Iberian Peninsula of the 16th and 17th centuries, revealing a profound—and long silenced—dialogue between Iberian and African cultures. Through vocal and instrumental repertories, it highlights how rhythmic, textual, and embodied practices of African origin permeated Iberian Baroque music, particularly in festive, theatrical, and popular contexts. At its core are villancicos known as negros, negrillas, or guineos—musical forms that relied on stereotyped representations of the “Black” figure in Golden Age culture. Interpreted today through a critical lens, these works simultaneously reveal mechanisms of caricature and the deep African imprint on Iberian music. Jarabí also includes dances and instrumental pieces with African or Afro-Iberian roots, belonging to genres that circulated intensely between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, becoming true vehicles of cultural mestizaje.
The term Jarabí, which may be translated as “beloved,” also refers to a well-known West African song popularized since the 1960s by kora players in countries such as Mali, Gambia, and Guinea. This symbolic resonance creates a bridge between past and present, illuminating the memory of anonymous and historically marginalized subjects whose traces remain fundamental to Iberian and Latin American music.
Jorge Molina, conductor