November offers in Spain two of the most interesting annual events devoted to contemporary music: the Vertixe Festival and the ME_MMIX Festival—two cycles that in 2025 have strengthened their ties in order to jointly undertake musical productions presented both in Vigo and in Palma de Mallorca, thus reaching a larger number of listeners and committing to a cultural cohesion so essential in these reinos de taifas—as Juan Goytisolo would say—that our autonomous communities so often resemble.
Having already looked at the November 20 programme of the ME_MMIX Festival, today we turn to the events that took place one day later, when the Balearic audience was able to enjoy up to four concerts of very different aesthetics—the quintessential hallmark of the programming once again curated by Mateu Malondra.
The first concert we attended on Friday the 21st, featuring oboist Pilar Fontalba, was a perfect example of that stylistic diversity, beginning with the music of Cuban composer Louis Aguirre—a creator whose numerous premieres by Fontalba reveal the deep atavism of his music and Aguirre’s ties to the Yoruba religion. Moyugba Eggun (2022, rev. 2025) reaffirms these connections from its opening, with a raw, torn cry through which Fontalba awakens the spirits of the ancestors, invoking them by joining a pedal bass drum with an oboe that itself becomes a primordial scream.
In contrast to the visceral violence with which the recital began, La peau douce (2021), a score for oboe and electronics by the Málaga-born composer Carolina Cerezo, sounded extremely subtle and refined, evoking the superb François Truffaut film of the same name. It is, above all, an exercise in memory that Fontalba performs kneeling before a series of objects (a guitar, tambourine, and boxes) on which transducers are placed whose resonances explore that “soft skin” of matter, delving into the multisensory nature of the reality surrounding us.
With pre-recorded passages (performed by Fontalba herself), we witness an entire superposition of acoustic–electronic layers multiplied by her manipulation of the objects, as she brushes the transducers across their surfaces, projecting onto them the oboe’s harmonic melodies as though echoes of Andalusi music had splintered off from a consciousness turning in on itself—objects awakening traces of memory as they are acoustically activated. Thus, the opening of the boxes in La peau douce turns them into genuine musical Pandora’s boxes through which the past (like the Yoruba spirits) returns, permeating the thin skin of oblivion. These memories, however, are not always gentle, and the passages played on oboe without reed—in air sounds, unpitched tones, and flatterzunge—reveal a tense roughness that draws out dark shadings, up to the final scraping of the tambourine in circles that return Fontalba to her interiority, plunged into a time that folds back upon itself.
Returning to Aguirre’s music, we heard Oriki a Oló-Okún (Dona nobis pacem) (2022), a score premiered by Pilar Fontalba in Santiago de Compostela as part of Vertixe Sonora’s Academia Cardinais. In it, Aguirre shares his experiences as a Yoruba priest, offering a full ritual for peace. With rhythmic and harmonic references to Indian ragas, Oriki a Oló-Okún includes spoken text and singing, summoning echoes of Giacinto Scelsi and his microtonal universe (so deeply influenced by Eastern music). Altogether, it forms a prayer that seemed to levitate in Es Baluard—and if, at its premiere, Fontalba performed immersed in a lighting design that evoked the stars, in Mallorca she did so in an analogous landscape: the setting provided by Brazilian artist Sandra Cinto’s exhibition Preludio para el sol y las estrellas, thus reinforcing another of the fundamental guiding principles of the ME_MMIX Festival: dialogue between music and the arts.
Written for oboe and electronics by Mikel Chamizo, Kaia (2013) pays homage to the sound of harbours and their millenary history, which here reaches back as far as ancient Greece. The electronics summon the natural landscape of those ports, giving voice to birds and multiplying the sea’s acoustic signals as a space of encounters. These are echoes that emerge mirrored by the waves until they reach the coast and collide with the multifaceted complexity of an oboe that gives voice to humankind. One senses influences ranging from Pierre Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double (1985) to Richard Wagner, from whose sublime Tristan und Isolde (1855–65) we hear a quotation of the English horn motif that, in plaintive lament—and likewise by the shore—opens the opera’s third act: a motif that is progressively deconstructed and, as if filtered through the waves in the harbour, acquires new forms in a display of virtuosity by Fontalba.
In the final bars of the score, the oboist more explicitly evokes the sound of the Greek aulos, playing two reeds simultaneously against an electronic backdrop that seems to tear previous oboe sounds away and hurl them against a breakwater—the breakwater of memory—where they are reshaped with each successive wave of recollection.
Louis Aguirre’s final piece, Mariwanga (2025), recalls Moyugba Eggun, with cycles of oboe trills and multiphonics whose rhythms seek to syncopate with those of the bass drum. We are faced with a new reflection on death; hence the quotations from the Dies irae, progressively distorted as though we were drunkenly celebrating the Day of the Dead in a Mexican cemetery. It is, therefore, a veritable dance of death to which Pilar Fontalba—seemingly possessed by trance—invites us, punctuating it with the histrionic cries that sealed a technically and expressively overwhelming performance, worthy of someone who is one of Europe’s finest oboists in the contemporary repertoire.
Another refined example of this came with the beginning of Kalam (2025), a score by the Jaén-born composer Guillermo Cobo that we heard in its world premiere. The densely saturated multiphonic glissandi that open the piece constitute a true technical delicacy that few oboists could unfold with the discernment and perfection shown by Fontalba, leaving even her exhausted after each cycle, conveying the sensation that we were hearing not an oboe but a trio of instruments—such is the proliferation of multiphonics she achieved at Es Baluard.
As in Oriki a Oló-Okún, the pictorial backdrop seen during the performance of Kalam—the installation La Noche (2025)—proved ideal, for in it we see staircases and spirals that seem to unravel the partials extracted from the oboe along its chains of harmonics, image becoming sound, though with a slightly greater roughness compared to the mural’s ethereal clarity. Time is another crucial dimension in Kalam, in the way Fontalba inhabits and dissects it with her successive changes of speed when presenting the multiphonics, stretching her cycles so that different resonances remain suspended in the air, like notes encountered in those eternal silences of infinite spaces that so terrified Pascal.
Pilar Fontalba’s concert closed with Los ratones (2017), a score for clarinet by the Seville-born Reyes Oteo, heard in Mallorca in a version for oboe. Based on poems by Juan Gabriel Jiménez, and beyond its rather coarse spoken recitations, the most interesting aspect of this work—during which Fontalba moves between music stands—lies in the variety of extended techniques unfurled by the oboe, all forming a palette that musicalises the life and movements of the rodents evoked by the verses.
After Fontalba’s concert, we headed to the cistern of Es Baluard, a space of enormous acoustic potential due to its elongated shape and barrel vault, which creates particularly immersive resonances. This was emphasised by EMEA (artistic name of Balearic musician Miquel Alzanillas) in his electroacoustic set, continually developing dialogues with the images he himself created, projected for us to witness how the geometric forms of the Aljub—their structures decomposed into prisms and cylinders—became the basis for an electronics of distinctly structural and architectural character.
Electronics were likewise fundamental in the concert of Mallorcan pianist Neus Estarellas, through which the ME_MMIX Festival continued to highlight the talent of Balearic artists. She was joined by Anxe Faraldo on electronics and Bruno Cominetti on sound engineering, once again emphasising the powerful sense of immersion with which they made us inhabit the architecture of Es Baluard’s cistern.
In the case of the first score performed by Neus Estarellas, Etouffée (2015), a work by Slovenian composer Vito Žuraj, we encounter a study for prepared piano in which adhesive putty is used to mute the strings except for fourteen keys, creating the sensation of hearing two pianos in one—something that, according to Alwyn T. Westbrooke, turns the piano into “a kind of hybrid between a xylophone and a set of Javanese gongs.”
Naturally, the stylistic echoes also lead us to John Cage, as the opening of Etouffée abounds in constellations that, despite the muted piano, lean into a powerful martellato. Oscillating between the dryness of whispered resonance and the brilliance of harmonics rediscovered through contrast with the muted strings, the central bars were delivered with a virtuosity that evoked both Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano, in its polyrhythmic sequences, and Ligeti’s staircases; all this without skimping on Romantic inflections that update the imprint of a Liszt seemingly carried into the free sensuality of jazz. Added to this is Neus Estarellas’s ability to present different rhythms in circling patterns that was truly impressive, as was her way of shaping structures, stylistic echoes, and aesthetically diverse evocations such as those offered here by Vito Žuraj.
The second score, Embâcle (2009), by the French composer Jérôme Combier, also begins impetuously in the low register, its sonority expanded by Neus Estarellas with sharp friction sounds on the strings that establish the first colouristic contrasts in a work whose conception of chromaticism suggests a twenty-first-century Scriabin. The difference in sound between the prepared strings and those left natural creates, as in Etouffée, an appealing contrast that, in Combier’s case, seems to evoke the Japanese koto. This is a dichotomy that Estarellas explores again and again on a piano that struggles against gravity in its search for a high tessitura, only to plunge back into a low register that grounds and magnetises the harmonic flight of Embâcle.
As if we were dealing with Italo Calvino’s Viscount, we hear in Embâcle a bisected piano in which harmony fades on the left half of the keyboard, while in the upper register colour gleams in its search for the final silence, with a rallentando phrasing that gradually comes to a halt—until a final activation of the strings produces a piercing resonance that returns our memory to primordial landscapes.
Neus Estarellas’s superb concert concluded with music by the Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes, whose piece for piano, toy piano, and electronics, Delirios (2024), was performed—having been premiered—by the Mallorcan pianist herself. In it, techno music dialogues with contemporary artistic creation, marking a striking divergence from the preceding scores and reinforcing the festival’s commitment to the convergence of diverse styles.
In total contrast with the opening of Embâcle, Delirios begins obsessively in the middle and upper octaves of the piano, with recitations and immersive electronics that shape the various atmospheres for the alternations between grand piano and toy piano, an instrument that evokes the sound of childhood, as if it were a music box: a glimmer of other harmonic possibilities in the constant exchange of borrowings between the two pianos and the electronics. In the way the electronics are handled, we find echoes of Iván Zulueta’s soundtracks for his travel films—so rhythmic, dynamic, and tinged with a lysergic quality. Other evocations lead us to more tense and vigorous pianos, like that of Luigi Nono in …..sofferte onde serene… (1975–77), both in their highly virtuosic constellations and in the links and resonances between piano and electronics—a whole dialectic of mirrors as a form of memory.
In this dialogue, the toy piano breathes tenderness into Delirios, but at the same time introduces something unsettling and unreal, as in the passages where both instruments perform echo-like variations (an Austrian imprint in Fuentes’s music here juxtaposed with the more repetitive side of pop), shifting from a timbre reminiscent of a carillon to a rhythmic saturation worthy of Ligeti. A thoroughly accomplished musical proposition, then—a faithful epitome of our present—offered to us by Neus Estarellas and the ME_MMIX Festival, in a concert that ended with a festive DJ set by Ishak Benavides.
Paco Yáñez