The Palau de la Música Catalana opens the season of its main cycle, Palau 100. Renowned orchestras from the international scene and great performers and conductors will pass through the modernist auditorium in 12 nights of emblematic classical music concerts, scheduled between October and May.
Symphonic concerts, baroque music evenings, 20th-century and also contemporary music will make the Palau vibrate, through pieces by composers such as Beethoven, Strauss, Mahler, Shostakovich, Bruckner, Mozart, and Monteverdi. Thus, the cycle will review great works from the symphonic repertoire of classical and also contemporary music.
The Vienna Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam will be two of the highlights of this season of the cycle, which will also feature as a prominent event the national premiere of Rufus Wainwright's Dream Requiem, commissioned by various international musical institutions, including the Palau.
The major events of the season will also include the one starring New York conductor Marin Alsop, leading the London Philharmonia Orchestra. The cycle will also feature relevant figures from the new generation of conductors emerging in the current music scene, such as Teodor Currentzis, Daniel Harding, Gustavo Gimeno, Pablo Heras-Casado, and Klaus Mäkelä, who will debut at the Palau.
Inaugural concert with the Vienna Philharmonic
The first of the concerts will be this Thursday, and the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Daniele Gatti, will be the protagonist. What is one of the best orchestras worldwide will arrive at the Palau with a program marked by two works from the Russian repertoire: Stravinsky's ballet Apollon Musagète, and Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, the first he wrote after Stalin's death.
The cycle will continue on Tuesday, October 29, with an appointment with the Granada-born conductor Pablo Heras-Casado and the British mezzosoprano Sarah Connolly, performing Bruckner's Third Symphony, whose bicentenary of birth is commemorated this year. Connolly will also perform Mahler's Rückert Lieder, five songs based on texts by the German poet.
The Luxembourg Philharmonic, Denis Kozhukhin's piano and the direction of Valencian Gustavo Gimeno will take over the Palau de la Música Catalana on Monday, November 4, with two emblematic works: the swing of Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F major, and Respighi's Feste romane and Pini de Roma, as a journey through the Italian capital.
November 21 will be the turn of conductor Philippe Herreweghe, with a Beethoven monographic, with his ensembles Collegium Vocale Gent and the Orchestre des Champs Élysées. Pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout will perform his Piano Concerto number 4, a work that will be complemented by another practically contemporary work by the genius from Bonn, his Mass in C major.
The cycle will welcome 2025 with Romeo and Juliet and Prokofiev's ballet suite. It will do so with a concert on January 13 with the London Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop, which will start with Sturm by composer Jessie Montgomery. From the early years of the 21st century, it will jump back to 1945, with María Dueñas's violin performing pieces by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, as a prelude to the suite of the ballet based on Shakespeare's illustrious tragedy.
January will also include one of the season's major events: the Palau will host on Saturday 25 the national premiere of the Dream Requiem, commissioned to American singer-songwriter and composer Rufus Wainwright by the Palau itself together with L'Auditori, the Orchestre Philharmonique Radio France, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Royal Opera House in London, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Dublin Symphony Orchestra. It will be performed by the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya (OBC), together with soprano Anna Prohaska and the Orfeó Català, all under the direction of Ludovic Morlot.
The program will also continue in January with the debut in Barcelona of young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, consolidated as one of the best in the world. He will do so with Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Korean Unsuk Chin's Subito con forza, pieces that fit with the Palau's season, programmed with heroes as the common thread.
The Swiss tenor Emiliano González Toro will lead the concert of the Ensemble I Gemelli, which will perform Vespro della Beata Vergine by Monteverdi, in a Palau 100 program that will also include a concert by Balthasar Neumann Chor & Orchester conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock; by the MusiAeterna orchestra with the Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, and by the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, under the baton of Daniel Harding.
The cycle will culminate with Mahler's Resurrection Symphony as the grand finale. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orfeó Català and the Cor de Cambra del Palau, also with Daniel Harding as conductor, will be in charge of putting the final touch to the season of the Palau 100 cycle, consolidated as the star cycle of the Barcelona musical institution.