Repertoire

Repertoire

The Barcelona Festival of Song® is dedicated to the in-depth study, performance, preservation, and dissemination of Latin American and Iberian art song. Its repertoire encompasses vocal works by composers from Spain, Portugal, and across Latin America, setting poetry in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Indigenous languages of the Americas.

This vast musical landscape spans the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It reflects the cultural plurality of these regions and reveals histories of migration, identity, memory, resistance, and exchange. The festival also explores connected Sephardic, Arabic, and Mediterranean traditions, recognizing the historical and musical relationships that link Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula to a broader cultural world.

BFOS brings together established works and lesser-known repertoire, including unpublished songs and compositions that are rarely performed even within their countries of origin. Many have been identified, recovered, or reconstructed through sustained musicological and archival research. These works remain absent from conventional classical singing curricula, not because they lack artistic value, but because performers and teachers have had limited access to scores, recordings, translations, diction resources, and historical context.

Since the festival’s founding, BFOS has worked closely with composers and poets to support the creation of new vocal music. Each year, the festival commissions a new song cycle, which receives its premiere during the festival. Beginning in 2027, the Art Song Composition Program will extend this commitment by creating a dedicated space for composers to explore the relationship between poetry, language, voice, and music while contributing to the repertoire’s future.

Participants do more than learn individual songs. They develop the tools to contextualize composers and poets, approach texts and languages with greater understanding, make informed interpretive decisions, and continue discovering repertoire independently. Singers, collaborative pianists, composers, musicologists, and voice teachers enter a musical world of remarkable breadth—one that offers a lifetime of artistic and scholarly exploration.

Through Mundo Arts Publications, BFOS also publishes rare and underrepresented works, making scores and supporting resources available to performers and teachers internationally. Explore the collection at www.mundoarts.com.