Saxophonist Irene Reig, composer Antoni Ros Marbà, choral singer Momi Maiga, and the duo Alosa are some of the recipients in the seventh edition of the Alícia Awards granted by the Catalan Academy of Music. At the gala held this Thursday at L'Auditori de Barcelona, the lifetime achievement award was also presented to organist Montserrat Torrent, who has just turned 100 years old.

At 88, Antoni Ros-Marbà is the dean of our musicians: composer, conductor, pedagogue, and master of masters. And now it's his turn to opera, a musical form that the musician from Hospitalet de Llobregat knows perfectly, having conducted various titles from very different repertoires.

"My motto is Albert Einstein's: life is like riding a bicycle, if you stop you fall," says Antoni Ros-Marbà (Hospitalet de Llobregat, 1937). He speaks with enthusiasm, happy to be able to share the details of Benjamin in Portbou, the opera he composed, with a libretto by Anthony Carroll Madigan (1938-2020). It is Ros-Marbà's first opera, and it premieres at the Liceu, which is scheduling two performances on July 19 and 21. "Most likely it will be the first and the last, because I don't have that much time left. But you never know," he says. In fact, at 88 years old, he still pedaling, because he's working on a "very particular" requiem, from which he's removed "the horror parts" and replaced them with "poems by Catalan poets." The provisional title: Requiem in our sea.