Rafael Adobas Bayog cannot keep still. Or rather, in the rare moments when the 27-year-old Ibizan flutist of Filipino descent is transfixed on stage, that stillness is charged and portends a thrilling explosion of musical effects. On a recent video call from Munich, he was constantly in motion – his fingers demonstrating an extended technique on an imaginary flute, his body swaying like a dancer, his eyes lively and mischievous.
Adobas Bayog’s musical journey has taken him from his birthplace on Ibiza where he started flute at age 8, to Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona and later to Musikhochschule München in Munich. A notable foray to Denmark in 2019 for the Carl Nielsen International Competition, his first international competition, earned him 3rd Prize. A year with the prestigious orchestra academy of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra was punctuated by his 1st Prize win at the 2022 Kobe International Flute Competition, considered the most important flute competition in the world. It was the first win by a Spaniard or a Filipino.
Before he could catch his breath, he was whisked off to New York for a Carnegie Hall appearance. Solo appearances around Europe and in Japan – notably as Kobe 1st Prize Winner at the Kobe Bunka Hall and the Hamarikyu Asahi Hall in Tokyo – and collaborations with the flute section of well-known orchestras such as Berliner Philharmoniker and NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester in Hamburg have kept him on the move. In September, he steps into the Principal Flute position at the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, his first such appointment.
Along the way he has won admiration not simply for his mastery of the flute but also for his imaginative weaving of forms, genres and cultural threads into collages and original compositions, and the theatrical energy he brings to the stage. Singing, dancing and dramatic recitation are often incorporated into his performance in a way that flows organically from the music.
Where do these instincts come from? Music was everywhere as Adobas Bayog grew up, he recalls. “My grandad played the whole range of guitars, like the bandurria, in a rondalla [string ensemble] in his hometown in the Philippines. They were just intuitive players. My dad plays. Everyone sings, also on my mom’s side, everyone has a voice and shows off during festivities – karaoke is in our culture’s DNA. Two uncles played professionally, in bars, improvising, into jazz, pop, R&B from the 70s and 80s – that’s the music I grew up with.”
Then there was the famed Ibiza electronic dance music scene. His family is also active in the local Filipino community in Ibiza and church on Sunday is central to the community. “Lots of Gospel songs. There was choir ministry, dance ministry, and a band. People played live in church – keyboards, drums, guitars – and the choir sang a mix, mostly American-influenced, with jazz and Gospel elements, in English, Tagalog and Spanish.” He started playing the flute, then when the keyboard player wasn’t around he took over. “I had been standing behind the piano for years and I could see how it was played… I learned to play the guitar in the same way.”
His dramatic instincts were honed in formal theatre training during his two pre-college years. “We did improvisations to create characters and write a skit from scratch.”
Later, at the conservatory in Ibiza, “our flute teacher, Joana Moragues Cantallops, introduced us to contemporary music and already some of these extended techniques and sound effects like frullato were notated in the pieces. Then experimentation showed me that some of the effects come easier for me, like multiphonics, for example, where you play four or five sounds at the same time – this harmonizing I learned in the church, and then I took it to the next level on the flute. Playing one voice and singing another.”
Once he got to Barcelona, he was encouraged to explore flamenco, ancient music and jazz. The Spanish-Filipino musical connections were less appreciated, he says. His Asian features appeared to confuse some. “I didn’t look ‘Spanish’ enough,” he observed, “even if it’s my country.” Spaniards would ask him, “Where are you from?” and he’d reply, “From Ibiza.” “Yes, but where?” they’d still want to know, “You’re not from Ibiza.”
The Munich conservatory was a turning point, he said. Everyone there embraced his identity. “Ah, you’re from Ibiza – great.” They focused on what he was doing musically. “But I needed structure,” he realized. “Because many of the things I was doing were intuitive. I would play for my teacher, Andrea Lieberknecht, and she would say, ‘Your sound is a bit strained… this is what you’re doing with the lips, your vowels are too small, your airflow…’ This was the same teacher who pushed me to go on writing more, to do collage, to mix different arts and genres.”
For the second round of the Carl Nielsen competition, he unveiled a striking original collage built around the text of a Nielsen quote, incorporating fragments of Nielsen’s music as well as that of a diversity of composers like Saariaho, Sciarrino, Ferneyhough, Bach, Clarke and Pardo. From Saariaho’s Laconisme de l’aile, which the composer opens by reciting from a poem by Saint-John Perse, he took the idea to declaim Nielsen’s words, “music is life, and like it, inextinguishable,” before recreating Saariaho’s soundscape streaked with the flight of birds. The 15-minute work, which he describes as following the phases of the moon, has an instinctual, propulsive drive, the seams between the score fragments shocking and yet invisible, as in a fine piece of haute couture. Flamenco made it into the collage, “from my years in Barcelona where I was in the same classroom with flamenco students and we would improvise, between classes, during break times.”
To underscore the disparate strands surrounding Nielsen’s Flute Concerto, he stamps out “a pattern inspired by the bulería, a traditional flamenco rhythm.” Elsewhere, a distinct house beat steals into the score. Toward the end, Adobas Bayog drops us into a hymn by Nielsen, spare yet grand, then modulates up a half-step in Gospel style, adding a second voice while he sings and plays the flute at the same time. The personal resonances mapped out in this intricate, exhilarating mosaic invite expansive conversations across genres and generations, and across the secular-sacred divide.
On a more intimate level but with equal ingenuity, Adobas Bayog crafted a set of ‘miniatures’ for flute and cello, based on Spanish-infused Filipino folk dance music and a haunting, more modern song written in a tribal style that harks back to pre-colonial days: to an epic tale of a flood as a metaphor for the modern-day persecution of ethnic Muslim communities. Cello and flute trade off playing melody, percussion and bird sounds. At one point, Adobas Bayog chants an unearthly invocation while Luka Coetzee thumps on the cello body. In another of his collages, Adobas Bayog ends up slumped over the piano as dancer Rosana Gutiérrez Ramírez drapes herself over him protectively.
Physicality, Adobas Bayog says, is “something I’m working on still. In Barcelona, as I was getting into competitions, I wanted to set a trademark in that style. In my performances I was sometimes even throwing my flute way up in the ending or being even more expressive… Prof. Lieberknecht did a complete deconstruction of my playing… so now I am trying to transform all of these energies into the sound.”
Key to the sound that he loves – apart from the Baroque repertoire and the great symphonies “where the flutes are shining” – is the folk influence, from the Brahms repertoire to Bartók, Prokofiev, Martinů, De Falla, Granados, Albeniz. His passion for Filipino music is particularly focused on songs driven by complex tribal, pre-colonial rhythms, often delivered by kulintang (gamelan-style gongs).
Upcoming commitments include a recital at the Septembre Musical Festival in Vevey. “In November, I’ll collaborate again with the wonderful Balearic Symphony Orchestra as a soloist,” he enthuses, “including a tour across the islands — Mallorca, Menorca, and Ibiza.” He’ll also rejoin the Berlin Phil this July on their tour to Japan with Gustavo Dudamel.
If this weren’t enough, his plans also include experimenting with electronics: “I’m really not a software guy – I hate computers, but this is the future.” He envisions using a loop pedal “to do a one-man show with more voices, colors and sounds,” and to experiment more with poetry, maybe Spanish or Tagalog. (He does speak six languages including Catalan, German and Italian.)
Such an ambitious bucket list might leave no remaining personal time whatsoever. But Adobas Bayog assures me he strives for balance. Out of curiosity I ask what this creator of extraordinary cross-cultural sonic inventions listens to in his spare time. “For sure, house, ever since I was 16,” he says. “Worship music. Latin music, like salsa. Reggaetón is a guilty pleasure! Dembow from the Dominican Republic which is very percussive and very pattern-repetitive – though the lyrics are not to be listened to! 70s and 80s Motown and disco. And l like musicals: voices like Barbara Streisand, Lea Salonga, the divas.” His tastes are not that different, it turns out, from his peers around the world. And perhaps that makes him an even more persuasive young champion of classical and new music.
Rafael Adobas Bayog is part of the 2025–26 Classeek Ambassador Programme. His recital is available to stream on Classeek now.
This article was sponsored by Classeek.
