Don Quixote Spanish

Roque Baños López (born 1968) is a Spanish music composer whose place of birth is Jumilla, a municipality in the Spanish region of Murcia. Baños graduated from Boston's Berklee College of Music in 1995 and has since scored both Spanish and English-language films. He has received numerous awards for his compositional work, including the Spanish Goya Award for Best Original Score in both 2008 and 2009.

The Catalan Roberto Gerhard studied piano with Granados, and was the only Spanish composer to study with Arnold Schoenberg. It was, however, over twenty years before he committed himself to writing twelve-tone music. In the interim, his output brought a new focus and precision (owing more to Stravinsky and Bartók) to the Spanish style. All the works on this album were composed in that period. Dating from the early 1940s, his ballet Alegrías was originally conceived for two pianos, but soon evolved into the four-movement suite heard here.

Roque Banos has been hired to score the upcoming film adaptation of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The film is directed by Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King, The Brothers Grimm) and stars Adam Driver, Michael Palin, Stellan Skarsgard and Olga Kurylenko. The movie follows a jaded young advertising executive who returns to the Spanish village where he made a film based on Cervantes’ masterpiece years earlier and meets a villager who believes himself to be Don Quixote as he gets swept up in a fantastic extravaganza complete with damsels in distress, knights and giants. Gilliam also co-wrote the screenplay with Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tideland) based on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. Gerardo Herrero (Son of the Bride) is producing the project with Mariela Besuievsky (The Secret In Their Eyes), Gabriele Oricchio and Amy Gilliam. Banos has previously scored the Herrero-produced feature The Last Circus. Alberto Iglesias was originally attached when the movie was set to go into production last year. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is expected to premiere in 2018.