‘A student of Ligeti, Roberto Sierra is the most prominent Latin American composer on the international scene. My first contact with Roberto’s music was not as a pianist but as a listener, and it was an absolute revelation.

‘If the Piezas Íntimas were for me the concentrated version of Roberto’s language, the Aphorisms are 28 fragments that live up to their name, each of them being a short sentence proposing what for me are Roberto’s compositional principles in their purest and most concise version – each of them exploring the dynamic and sonic range of the instrument in a matter of seconds. His Sonatas, as I began to study them, opened me up to a world full of completely fresh sonorities, structures and approaches. The Sonatas span a world from Central Europe, where their structure strengthens in the second half of the 18th century, to the region of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries, where sonata movements contained Afro-Caribbean elements linked to sudden appearances of elements as different from each other as flamenco, salsa, pasodoble or tango, followed by slow movements that seem like improvisations (despite the exactness with which they have been written), filled with nocturnal music, an aria da capo that loses its original rhythm and becomes “out of balance”.’

The constant evolution and artistic openness of Alfredo Ovalles as a musician make him difficult to categorise. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, the pianist has explored many different musical worlds. The combination of his classical upbringing, in parallel with his experience playing in rock and pop bands in Caracas “made music seem like one single world, where borders are very blurry and performances in one genre inform the approach to a different, seemingly unrelated kind of stage”. Performing in some of the most prestigious festivals in Europe, such as Wien Modern, Transart Festival in Bolzano, and the Warsaw Autumn Festival, his collaboration with The Black Page Orchestra has led him from performing Stockhausen in an abandoned submarine pier in Croatia to premiering ensemble and solo works in venues such as the Lutoslawski Hall of the Polish National Radio or the Wiener Konzerthaus. Composers with whom Alfredo has collaborated include names such as Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, François Sarhan, Roberto Sierra, and Mirela Ivičević.