Four years later, after finishing his course with Dieter Kaufmann, among others, he was admitted in the Chair of Composition commanded by Francis Burt – Sotelo dedicated to him the piece De Vinculis: Ge-Burt.
This group has to be considered a sort of "fetish" ensemble to Sotelo for two reasons: first, the personal relationship with Furrer and the musicians; second, the close and continuous work with them to create many pieces, from the Trio Basso – a R.H.R.
From the turn to the 21st century, Sotelo consolidated his career in contemporary music, being institutionally recognized and finishing many main pieces like the cycle Wall of Light (2003–2007) – devoted to the figure of Sean Scully – Sonetos del amor oscuro.
This biographic and musical affinity with the Italian artist produced several branches in Sotelo's composition: architecture of memory, oral tradition, act of performing, sound, Andalousian cante jondo.
Also at the end of his years in Vienna, but materialized after his return to Spain in 1992, the composer came into contact with the poet José Ángel Valente, another of the key figures in Sotelo's creation.
The figure of Federico García Lorca also appears in Sotelo's music in 1998, for the first time, when he finishes the pieces Canta la luz herida por el hielo.
This seduction for the lorquian world is again reinforced in Sotelo's creative life since 2012, when he's invited to create a new opera: El público – commissioned by Gerard Mortier for the Teatro Real – in a prologue and five scenes, with a libretto by Andrés Ibáñez, after the text by Lorca published around 1930, performed for the first time in Puerto Rico in 1979 and seven years later in Spain.
It's possible to check this from the own Sotelo's words: ...two essential characteristics of the painting of Sean Scully, which (…) are fully in accordance with my concept of sound: the formal aspect and the oscillations of color (…).
In a certain sense, the flare of color of the various strongly luminescent layers creates a kind of 'dance'[4] All these poetic and artistic influences have to be understood as aæthetic keys to analyze the way in which Sotelo sees his own process of composition, but also as conceptual, textual and visual references to have in our minds when listening his music.
Since then, Sotelo shows a deep knowledge of it and devotes it a great attention but always looking for his own way to use it, maybe not too obvious at the beginning of his career –as we see in pieces like Soleá or Bulería (1984)– but well defined most recently in Como llora el viento (2007), a work for guitar and orchestra.
Una maschera di cenere, 1996–99), Carmen Linares (In pace, 1997), Esperanza Fernández (Nadie, 1995–1997), Miguel Poveda (Sonetos del amor oscuro, 2003–2005) and Francisco José Arcángel Ramos 'Arcángel'.
Only four elements: violin (truth), bailaora (history), cajón (time) and live electronics (light) –according with the programmatic reference to Goya's painting of 1812– show a more minimal work, with an intense and vivid co-participation between the Moldavian violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fuenstana 'la Moneta', who premiered this piece in Madrid.
Sotelo also calls for the 'compás' through the use of a specific rhythm or tempo in the most of his pieces from the middles nineties, even if there's no other reference to any other form of flamenco –title, instruments, performers or poetic allusion-.
Here we find how the composer has absorbed the deep conscience of what this tradition has to mean to the musician: after the years of study and the hours spent in developing the technique, flamenco –and also any kind of music or art– is a sort of inner language in which memory and experience are re-invented.
In Sotelo's hands, flamenco is no longer an exotic musical style linked to the conventional topics of the Spanish touristic image or a bourgeois approach of a strictly academic composer.
After the years in Wien and the academic studies, after the art and poetry influence and his recent spectrum researches, he acts, finally, like a 'cultural nomad', as Nicolas Bourriaud has defined the artist's role in the altermodernity[5] of today.
That's why we shall define Sotelo's music as a new form of tradition, a kind of 'alterflamenco', taking the prefix 'alter' as the sign of "an art-form exploring all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and space" –in Bourriaud's words–.