José Valentino Bajista

The Andalusian singer’s debut brushes electronic beats and R&B melodies over a flamenco canvas. It is a masterful meditation on ancestral struggle that looks back to find a way forward.

The Andalusian singer’s debut brushes electronic beats and R&B melodies over a flamenco canvas. It is a masterful meditation on ancestral struggle that looks back to find a way forward.

José de Nebra, born in 1702 to a family of musicians from Aragón, already made his career in Madrid as a young man: at the age of 17 he took over the position of organist from Tomás de Victoria and also celebrated great success at the opera. In 1736 he was appointed organist and later vice kapellmeister of the Royal Chapel. From this time on, his creative focus was on sacred music and he created more than 170 sacred compositions. After the coronation of Fernando VI and his wife Bárbara de Braganza, the musical work at the court experienced a great revival: the queen brought the famous musicians Scarlatti and Farinelli to the Spanish court and the Royal Chapel also experienced a great boom.

The title track on José Feliciano’s latest album Behind This Guitar sums up, with uncanny accuracy, the still-unfolding career of this remarkable and singular figure in American musical culture of the last half-century. Puerto Rican by birth, a New Yorker (Spanish Harlem) from his childhood, José Feliciano has been a fact of American musical life since his breakthrough at the height of the Sixties – the golden age of American pop and rock music.

Sarah Willis is a tireless ambassador for her instrument, the French horn, which she champions around the world. A horn player with the famous Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra since 2001, she launched what was soon to become a famous TV programme, ‘Sarah’s Music’, for Deutsche Welle in 2014, interviewing personalities ranging from Gustavo Dudamel to Wynton Marsalis. The award-winning programme presents music with warmth and in all its diversity.

Josep Maria Carreras i Coll born 5 December 1946, better known as José Carreras, is a Spanish tenor who is particularly known for his performances in the operas of Verdi and Puccini.
Born in Barcelona, he made his debut on the operatic stage at 11 as Trujamán in Manuel de Falla's El retablo de Maese Pedro and went on to a career that encompassed over 60 roles, performed in the world's leading opera houses and in numerous recordings. He gained fame with a wider audience as one of the Three Tenors along with Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti in a series of mass concerts that began in 1990 and continued until 2003. Carreras is also known for his humanitarian work as the president of the José Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation (La Fundació Internacional Josep Carreras per a la Lluita contra la Leucèmia), which he established following his own recovery from the disease in 1988.