Festival de Música de Canarias

The Canary Islands International Music Festival (FIMC) is held every year in January and February on all the islands. In these almost four decades, the Canary Islands Music Festival has become an international benchmark in the world of classical music festivals, both for its high artistic quality and for the peculiar characteristic of being the event that inaugurates musical activity in Europe every year. This makes it the only festival of its European winter specialty, but a winter that -in relation to the rest of Europe and thanks to the favorable climate of our land- is really a pleasant spring.

The FIMC held its first edition in January 1985 – declared the European Year of Music in commemoration of the tercentenaries of Bach, Haendel and Scarlatti – at the initiative of the then president of the Canary Islands, Jerónimo Saavedra. Its founding objectives, still valid today and the driving force behind each edition, were:

1. Enrich the cultural offer of a region that enjoys a secular musical tradition since the dawn of the 19th century.

2. Give international prestige to the name of the Canary Islands beyond the traditional cliché of 'sun and beach'.

3. Promote the influx to the Islands of cultural tourism of a higher level than usual.

Almost all of the leading figures of the musical firmament have passed through the Festival. By way of example we can cite the names of directors such as C. Abbado, R. Muti, D. Barenboim, Sir Colin Davis, J. E. Gardiner, E.-P. Salonen, Sir S. Rattle, C. Thielemann, A. Previn, W. Sawallisch, R. Chailly, B. Haitink, M. Jansons, C.M. Giulini, V. Neumann, S. Celibidache, G. Dudamel, V. Guérguiev, Sir G. Solti, among many others.

The list of soloists who have participated in the Festival is equally impressive. Always by way of example we remember A. Kraus, Plácido Domingo, J. Carreras, M. Rostropovich, K. Zimerman, I. Pogorelich, C. Gallardo-Domâs, MJ Pires, V. Ashkenazy, I. Stern, Midori, S Mintz, Yo Yo Ma, Katia and Marielle Labèque, R. Lupu, H. Szeryng, C. Studer, F. Lott, V. Spivakov, A. Netrebko, JD Flórez, Lang Lang, AS Mutter, G. Sokolov, and A. long etcetera that would be lengthy to enumerate.

An important part of the program is the absolute premieres that have been made by direct order of the Festival since 1990.
The geographic diversity of the Canary Islands and the circumstance that music is present throughout the Archipelago is another distinctive feature that always causes great admiration both among the public and among the artists who visit us and that make our Festival unique.