VISITACION[e]S, a substantial song cycle for soprano and orchestra to premiere in Autumn 2025
The Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España have commissioned Òscar to write a substantial new orchestral song cycle, which will be premiered in November 2025 under the direction of David Afkham with soprano Jone Martínez as the vocal soloist. This project is part of the OCNE’s 2025-26 season, which places a strong emphasis on contemporary creation.
The work reflects on ongoing artistic concerns in Òscar’s music, following from his latest orchestral work, The Styx (2024) which was received with acclaim at the ENSEMS Festival in València.
VISITACION[e]S [24′]
This new orchestral song cycle for soprano and orchestra is built around an intertextual selection of poetic texts which, though separated by centuries and geography, seem to speak to us with a single voice. The cycle is conceived as a series of VISITACION[e]S (visitaciones/visitacions, Spanish and Catalan for “visitations”)—a term that refers to the experience of receiving in dreams the presence of a departed loved one. This idea, found in many cultural traditions, is expressed by the Chinese concept of tuo meng (the appearance of the dead in the dreams of the living) and the Arabic notion of ru’ya (a prophetic or revelatory dream that transcends time).
The texts chosen for the cycle—from Tang dynasty China to medieval Persia and Al-Andalus, from the courts of the early troubadours to the voice of contemporary Catalan poet Joan Margarit— present themselves before us with an uncanny emotional continuity. They are joined to create this meta-poem not because of a historical argument but because of their sensibility: their direct but transcendent tone, their tenderness toward what has been lost, and a profound meditation on absence, time, and memory.
This unlikely poetic dialogue was inspired in part by De la China a al-Andalus, a short but illuminating monograph by Anne-Helene Suárez and collaborators (published by Azul). The book traces how poetic forms and images travelled from Tang dynasty China along the Silk Road, through Persia and the Arabic-speaking world, into medieval Al-Andalus (in this case, Arab Valencia), and from there across the Iberian Peninsula into Occitania—ultimately shaping the poetic language of the earliest troubadours. The inclusion of Joan Margarit, with his deeply humane voice, brings the cycle full circle: across millennia, cultures, and languages, these texts speak with what feels like a single voice—vulnerable, direct, and strangely contemporary.
Yet VISITACION[e]S is not a traditional lament, nor a threnody sung by the living to mourn those who have departed. Instead, it chooses to invert that perspective. Here, the voice belongs to those who have crossed to the other side. They return and appear to us in our dreams not to be mourned, but to express their longing: for our gestures, our small rituals, objects, spaces and silences. In this liminal space between life and death, the roles are reversed: it is they who sing their yearning for the fragility of our days. In a kind of reverse elegy, in these visitations we receive their voice —not as echo, but as presence.
From the melancholy of Li Bai (701–762) in Tang dynasty China, to the refinement of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (1048–1131), the enigmatic lyricism of Guilhem de Peitieu (1071–1126), the humanity of Valencian-Andalusian poet Al-Rusafi (d. 1177), and the existential depth of Joan Margarit (1938–2021), the work proposes a dialogue on the continuity of human feeling, memory, and the universality of loss.
VISITACION[e]S
- Voy haciendo un poema de la nada
- En el fondo de un bosque
- ¿Dónde estás, amor mío?
- Aún no ha amanecido
- Ya parte la caravana hacia la nada
Booking & Tickets: https://ocne.mcu.es/programacion/sinfonico-07
Press links:
Scherzo: https://scherzo.es/la-ocne-presenta-su-temporada-2025-2026/?cmplz-force-reload=1749279144303
Platea magazine: https://www.plateamagazine.com/noticias/18549-la-orquesta-y-coro-nacionales-de-espana-presenta-su-temporada-25-26-la-ultima-con-david-afkham-al-frente
Opera Actual: https://www.operaactual.com/noticia/wozzeck-inaugura-el-curso-25-26-de-la-ocne/
