Founded in 1999 by the percussionist and pedagogue Miquel Bernat, the percussion group Drumming is today a true institution of Portuguese music in result of a trajectory of stealth integrity and artistic excellence in the territories of classical music, jazz and electronic music, that also includes occasional interactions with theater, opera and ballet. The unique and personalized work of this group has benefited over the years from collaborations and the musical input of several other formations and instrumentalists, such as Ivan Monigueti (cello), Glen Velez (percussion), Sérgio Carolino (tuba) or Edicson Ruiz (a member of the Simon Bolivar Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic), as well as of prestigious Portuguese composers such as Bernardo Sasseti and António Pinho Vargas. In addition to its strictly musical activity, it is also important to highlight that Drumming is a pioneer in the creation of ensembles of traditional instruments – namely a timbila orchestra (an African traditional instrument and an ancestor of marimba) devoted to the interpretation of music from Mozambique’s oral tradition and contemporary compositions created specifically for the group; in that same context, the Portuguese percussion group also founded the first steel drums (a traditional instrument Trinidad and Tobago) ensemble of the Iberian Peninsula, equally focused on both traditional and contemporary compositions.

Daniel Bernardes is a composer and pianist with a diverse musical background that includes, besides his preliminary classical studies and a degree in piano jazz, the attendance of several contemporary composition seminars under the guidance, among others, of the influential composer Emanuel Nunes. Since the beginning of his professional career, Bernardes has been involved in a myriad of projects – from jazz bands to the composition for orchestras, cinema, theater and television – and has been developing a meritorious work of constant dialogue between different musical and artistic aesthetics in the context of creative initiatives of transdisciplinary nature, of which the show “O Rondó da Carpideira”, based on Michel Giacometti’s musical research, is a paradigmatic example.

Born in Romania and later naturalized Austrian, György Ligeti is widely perceived as one of the greatest and most influential composers of classical and avant-garde music of the last century. Co-agitator and collaborator of other seminal figures in the transformative currents of musical creation in the classical tradition developed after the Second World War, such as, among others, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez or Mauricio Kagel, Ligeti bequeathed majestic works to posterity (“Atmosphères”, “Lux Aeterna” or “Advenytures/Nouveles Adventures”, among others), and, through them, he inscribed his own personal idiom into the musical fabric of the second half of the 20th century, introducing innovative musical concepts such as micropoliphonies and unprecedented influences, such as African rhythms fused into spectral masses of sound. The creative and cultural impact of Ligeti’s visionary and disruptive work transcended artistic boundaries and was immortalized in the collective cinematographic imaginary through its auratic presence in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Shining”.