Gerard Mortier

Opera director and administrator

"Mauricio, a great friend and a magnificent artist! What a pleasure to prepare together a new opera! Thanks for your poetry, your invention, your virtuosity." (Madrid, 03 November 2010)

Helmut Lachemann

Composer and Professor

"I know, appreciate and admire Mauricio Sotelo as an internationally recognized composer with a very personal style. He is endowed with a brilliant and sovereign metier in all compositional genres and a universal art-philosophical background. I've been experiencing him since I've known him, with all his structuralist character, as it is ensured not least by his training with Luigi Nono, at the same time stylistically open, definitely not denying his Iberian landscape roots and instead constantly introducing them imaginatively."

Alfred Brendel

Pianist and Writer

When a few years ago I met Mauricio Sotelo, he was just about to familiarize himself with Liszt's Sonata. This not only led to a friendship but also induced the idea of writing a work that would relate both to the Sonata and to our encounter. In the last decades, a number of musical works have emerged that are composed interpretations of older ones. We can regard them as a counter-position to historicising performances that have established themselves in many concert halls. According to Hans Zender, himself a contributor to this new species, the composer "is creator. But he is these days also an interpreter of the past to which he relates - whether seeking to surmount it, or to carry on." Sotelo's work is a confrontation of this kind, an argument dealing with the shape and the material of Liszt's Sonata that has resulted in something personal and spectacular.

Emilio Lledó

Philosopher and Writer

Mauricio Sotelo's music is one of the most intense illuminations that, in the air of sounds, can find the semantics of words. I heard about Mauricio from one of the greatest composers of our time, Luigi Nono, who I met in 1988 at the Institut for Advanced Study in Berlin. Luigi was the one who asked me if I knew a young Spanish composer about whom, I confess, knew nothing about. Since then, the admiration I felt for Nono is linked to the person and music of Mauricio. The work of two disappeared friends [Luigi Nono and José Ángel Valente] grows, lasts, illuminates and survives in the prodigious sound universe of Mauricio Sotelo.

Francis Wolff

Philosopher and Writer

Your music shows that twentieth-century anti-tonal academic standards can be shattered, just as the atonal music of the last century shattered nineteenth-century tonal norms. Few operas are successful because there is an insurmountable contradiction between the demands of singing and the straitjacket of norms of the second half of the twentieth century. You use "flamenco" as a crutch to not cut your music from any popular roots nor any expressive cues for the listener. There are other ways with other contemporary composers whom I admire when they are not obsessed with experimentalist temptations and when they remain in love with the voice (there are few) and faithful to the expressive vocation of the "opera" genre. So I rarely enjoy contemporary operas because, as I once replied to another journalist, "I am not interested in 'interesting' music." I was recently moved by an opera by George Benjamin, and more recently by your opera "El Público".

Gerard Mortier

Opera director and administrator

"Mauricio, a great friend and a magnificent artist! What a pleasure to prepare together a new opera! Thanks for your poetry, your invention, your virtuosity." (Madrid, 03 November 2010)

Helmut Lachemann

Composer and Professor

"I know, appreciate and admire Mauricio Sotelo as an internationally recognized composer with a very personal style. He is endowed with a brilliant and sovereign metier in all compositional genres and a universal art-philosophical background. I've been experiencing him since I've known him, with all his structuralist character, as it is ensured not least by his training with Luigi Nono, at the same time stylistically open, definitely not denying his Iberian landscape roots and instead constantly introducing them imaginatively."

Alfred Brendel

Pianist and Writer

When a few years ago I met Mauricio Sotelo, he was just about to familiarize himself with Liszt's Sonata. This not only led to a friendship but also induced the idea of writing a work that would relate both to the Sonata and to our encounter. In the last decades, a number of musical works have emerged that are composed interpretations of older ones. We can regard them as a counter-position to historicising performances that have established themselves in many concert halls. According to Hans Zender, himself a contributor to this new species, the composer "is creator. But he is these days also an interpreter of the past to which he relates - whether seeking to surmount it, or to carry on." Sotelo's work is a confrontation of this kind, an argument dealing with the shape and the material of Liszt's Sonata that has resulted in something personal and spectacular.

Francis Wolff

Philosopher and Writer

Your music shows that twentieth-century anti-tonal academic standards can be shattered, just as the atonal music of the last century shattered nineteenth-century tonal norms. Few operas are successful because there is an insurmountable contradiction between the demands of singing and the straitjacket of standards of the second half of the twentieth century. You use flamenco as a crutch to not cut your music from any popular roots nor any expressive cues for the listener. There are other ways with other contemporary composers whom I admire when they are not obsessed with experimentalist temptations and when they remain in love with the voice (there are few) and faithful to the expressive vocation of the "opera" genre. So I rarely enjoy contemporary operas because, as I once replied to another journalist, "I am not interested in 'interesting' music." I was recently moved by an opera by George Benjamin, and more recently by your opera "El Público".