Family Concerts. The objective set for the new season of Family Concerts is to spotlight human values and cheer. The season kicked off this past December in Donostia-San Sebastián with "La viola no está sola" (The viola is not alone) and continues this Saturday, February 4, with "Historia de un soldado" (The Soldier's Tale). In Vitoria-Gasteiz the season will get under way this Sunday, February 5, at the Teatro Principal with "The Soldier's Tale". The show is a re-creation of Stravinsky's classic "The Soldier's Tale" (L'histoire du soldat), featuring puppets and shadows created and directed by Santi Arnal, and performed by the company Per Poc and a group of instrumentalists from the BNO. In March the percussion group Stick Dance Quartet will present "Una Caja de sorpresas" (A box of surprises), showing us how just about any object can be turned into a musical instrument. This concept is aimed at audiences of all ages, but the Vitoria-Gasteiz performance will be specially designed for tots. In May, the sound of the full Orchestra will ring out in all its glory in "Sheherazade y otras voces" (Scheherazade and other voices), with perfomances in Donostia-San Sebastián only. And in June the series will be back in full swing with "40 urteko algara", celebrating Txirri, Mirri eta Txiribiton, the clowns that have put smiles on Basque faces for 40 years, bringing audiences moments of joy and laughter with their fun-loving antics. Before all of the concerts, except for "Una caja de sorpresas" in Vitoria, there will be a Music Appreciation Workshop, designed to promote active listening. Again ths season, the Family Concerts series is a co-production between the BNO, the Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council and the Kursaal Foundation.

Departing from silence, the musicians and music therapists Carles Pérez Collado and Andreu Ubach propose a journey transporting mums and babies into a world of vibration, rhythm and sensations connecting them to the cycles of nature and the beating of their own hearts. Creation and improvisation set around the possibilities offered by Baschet instruments and active participation of the attendees will be key to development of the concert.

Baschet's educational instrumentarium comprises fourteen sound structures including percussion, string and crystal. The creation of this new family of instruments stemmed from the acoustic principle discovered in 1952 by brothers François and Bernard Baschet, one a sculptor and the other an engineer. The wealth and variety of the sounds extracted from the metal interior of the Baschet sound structures offer a highly unusual look at the phenomenon of sound and music serving to develop the imagination, curiosity and musical expression.

Apart from its value in the field of music education, the Baschet instrumentarium is enormously pleasing to the eye. Thus, these structures, not unlike musical sculptures, with colourful forms which could easily come from a Miró painting or a Calder mobile, have enjoyed exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid.

Tickets for this first concert for pregnant women and babies under nine months organised by the Basque National Orchestra's Music Room sold out in days. This experience will be repeated at the Teatro Principal in Vitoria on March 27 as part of the Family Concerts given in the city in coproduction with Vitoria City Council.

A few short inserts are added to Tchaikovsky's magical music for dance by Nicolas Duperior and the director/choreographer of the Malandain Ballet Biarritz National Choreography Centre, Thierry Malandain. Their aim, to create a performance uniting memories, sentimental nuances, reminiscences of Tchaikovsky's ballets. Magifique is the word Malandain used to exclaim his astonishment as a child. "Magnificent with no n, that invented word, that short-circuit, is the perfect match for this creation, in Malandain's words: provoking magic or, rather, recycling the raw material of life to produce expressive, poetic forms." Backed by the acclaim of its presentation in December 2009, ‘Magifique' now comes to us adorned with the magnificence etched by the live music of a symphony orchestra upon the dancing, the stage design and its visuals.

The Orchestra conductor for the occasion is Eduardo Portal, from Burgos. This director, who takes to the Orchestra podium for the first time, has worked among others with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (more information at www.euskadikoorkestra.es).

Prior to the performance, an open rehearsal. A few hours before its Season Concert premiere and as part of the activities organised by the Orchestra's Music Room, over a thousand children from the third cycle of primary school and the first cycle of secondary school came together at the Kursaal to attend the open rehearsal of "Magifique," an endeavour undoubtedly set to become a very special first contact with the audience.

Thanks to the all-important collaboration of the Basque Government Department of Education, Universities and Research, the third player in this project, we can achieve an even greater distribution of SINFOKIDS, given that the DVD will be sent out to every primary school in the Basque Country.

In other words, SINFOKIDS is a product created by the Basque National Orchestra, produced by Eitb and distributed to the school world by the Basque Government Department of Education, Universities and Research.

SINFOKIDS was born not only with its eyes set on continuity, but as the audiovisual tool thanks to which we can go ahead with showing boys, girls and adults the musical universe, seen from an amusing, quality angle deliberately avoiding the clichés so often related to classical music.