"The best prize is that the music is played, but, obviously, I am very grateful for the prizes. And this one makes me very happy because the surprise was tremendous," explains the composer Benet Casablancas (Sabadell, 1959). The award in question is the XX SGAE Prize for Ibero-American Music Tomás Luis de Victoria, which he will receive on May 26 in the Manuel de Falla hall at the SGAE headquarters in Madrid. "May it be welcome. We will try to be up to the task," he says during a conversation in which unforgettable memories emerge, such as the "fabulous" recording of Set escenes de Hamlet with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with a juicy and quite significant anecdote about a ghost verse; the meeting with George Benjamin in the glorious days of the Teatre Lliure Chamber Orchestra in the early nineties, and, further back, "the small orchestra" that Casablancas put together "as a youngster" and with which he performed the central nocturne of Vistes al mar, by Eduard Toldrà, in front of Frederic Mompou, Xavier Montsalvatge and Xavier Turull, "a moment when the history of Catalan music passed through Sabadell".