The FBBVA Fronteras Awards are once again turning Bilbao into the capital of knowledge.

Stravinsky’s death in April 1971 coincided with George Benjamin’s family vacation in Málaga, which was his first visit to Spain. As he said during his thanksgiving speech, the news came as a shock to him, who was already “a fanatical admirer of the Sacred Spring” even though he was only 11 years old: “But my connection with Spain goes back much further, to the first half of the 17th century, when my ancestor Isaac Abendana, a Jewish convert, fled the Inquisition in Cantabria and traveled through Germany and the Netherlands before finally settling in England. There he had a distinguished academic career, first at Cambridge and then in England. then in England, at Oxford,” the composer said.