I confess: I arrived late and missed Albert Guinovart's Dalí-esque piece (The Secret LifeBut my companion, who arrived on time, showered me with praise.

The Temporada Alta festival opens with a bang, with a double concert by Patti Smith, a living legend of American rock, at the Girona Auditorium. Two weeks before the beginning of the festival, Autumn theatre programming in the Girona regions, the 78-year-old singer reviewed the best songs of her career, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of her debut album, Horsas, one of the most influential in history.

The latest issue of the Catalan Musical Magazine dedicates a comprehensive and accurate dossier to the figure of Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943), a leading figure of Catalan piano music and of the musical avant-garde of the first third of the 20th century, who has an indisputable international projection. He was a generational companion and friend of composers such as Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, and his interpretative technique is still remembered through some of the recordings he made throughout his life. An intense life despite a sad end, with Viñes condemned to poverty in his last three years, lived in Barcelona.

There are friendships that endure beyond one's own life and impact future generations. This is the case of Conxita Badia and Pau Casals, two musicians and friends whose respective careers were cut short by the Civil War. This year, the fiftieth anniversary of their death, we celebrate the Year of Conxita Badia with a series of events that aim to vindicate the figure –not sufficiently known– of one of the best Catalan sopranos of the 20th century.

One of the advantages of writing concert reviews is that you don't have to worry about spoilers, just record what happens throughout a performance. But the concert that The Little One of Cal Eril performed this Tuesday at the Ideal Arts Center in an inflatable igloo, which confronts us with the age-old dilemma of film criticism: how to analyze the work's surprises and twists without spoiling them for the reader? A particularly legitimate question when it comes to the first of seven special igloo concerts (four consecutive in Barcelona and, later, in Lleida, Girona and Tarragona) with which the band led by Joan Pons reunites with its fans to present its new album. Eril Eril Eril, after two and a half years of unemployment. So the only option to avoid spoiling the party for the audience and the band is to try to explain an extraordinary concert without going into the details of what makes it extraordinary.