Gulbenkian Music continues its collaboration with the Cantabile Festival that started in 2010.
This year, one of the Festival’s strengths is French music, represented in the first concert (14th September) by Fauré and Poulenc. In 1920, Henri Collet wrote an article that identified six young Parisian composers as «Les Six», a group under the influence of the writer Jean Cocteau, among whom was Poulenc. The music of the various composers was regarded as a reaction against the pomposity of Wagner and the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.

In the second Cantabile Festival concert (17th September) , the creative language of the young Swiss violinist and composer Helena Winkelman emerges strongly marked by a common love for jazz and Renaissance music, employing various musical currents for each of her works. However, her composition is also admittedly inspired by other fields such as literature, psychology and philosophy, and she has used the literary works of Dante Alighieri, Tal Nitzan, Johanna Arp and Ungaretti as stimuli for her musical writing.