Heroes have always been talked about a lot, with their capes and supernatural powers, but it is becoming fashionable to look for everyday heroes, without so many special effects and much more rudimentary. This is where the Palau de la Música will be located next season, with the aim of approaching their figure, as well as that of anti-heroes, through the music of composers such as Wagner, Strauss, Bach, Vivaldi, Händel, Mahler and Beethoven. "We want to invite spectators to review this concept with an unanswered question: Who are the heroes and heroines of our days?", explained the deputy artistic director, Mercedes Conde Pons, at the presentation of the 2024-2025 season, which will have as its motto The most human music.
It is in this reflection that the local musician Juli Garreta will fully enter, a composer considered by many as the "Catalan Strauss", a title to which he himself did not give much importance, maintaining his facet as a watchmaker from Sant Feliu de Guíxols. "If anyone represents the figure of an anti-hero, it is Garreta," stressed the artistic director of the Palau de la Música, Joan Ollé. It will be used to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth and the 100th anniversary of his death, with six concerts, among which Més Garreta! with the GIO Symphonia and a title that refers to the words pronounced by Stravinsky when he heard him in Barcelona.
Another of the protagonists will be the Barcelona composer Raquel García-Tomás, one of the guest artists of the 2024-2025 season. After her recent success at the Liceu with her opera Alexina B., García-Tomás will return with six concerts to the Palau de la Música and three of them will be absolute premieres, taking the opportunity to review old works and premiere new creations, thus managing to address some of her hallmarks, such as dialogue with tradition, the commitment to opera and interdisciplinarity. "She is an essential name in the current panorama," remarked Conde Pons. With three commissioned works, one of them "wants to capture the essence of the waltz in a work that will not be one," as García-Tomás pointed out, at the request of the Palau de la Música, the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic of Galicia and the Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera. The second guest composer of the season will be the American Steve Reich, one of the promoters of the musical current of minimalism. Given his advanced age, he will not travel to the city.
More than 300 concerts will make up the 2024-2025 season, a figure that grows again for another year, with 14 premieres and nine commissions. The great national and international names that will star in them will be Pablo Heras-Casado, Teodor Currentzis, Philippe Herreweghe, Jonas Kaufmann, Gustavo Dudamel, María Dueñas, Klaus Mäkelä, Alice Sara Ott, Grigory Sokolov, John Eliot Gardiner, Serena Sáenz and Iréne Theorin, among others. There will be high-level orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, in addition to the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, along with the Orfeó Català and the Cor de Cambra del Palau, and the return of choral ensembles such as the Collegium Vocale Gent and the Balthasar Neumann Chor. The millennium of Montserrat will also sneak into the Palau de la Música's program with six concerts, three of them with the Escolania de Montserrat. Some of them will be held in parallel in Montserrat.
"I am very proud of what we present here today, also of the programming that will be done throughout Barcelona. The city is at a top artistic level. We have to be proud of Barcelona's musical ecosystem," said the president of the Palau de la Música, Joaquim Uriach. With the increase in concerts and some of them being more expensive, the artistic budget will be 4.1 million euros next season. It will be above the 3.5 million euros of the previous season, in which 145,000 tickets were sold and an 80% occupancy was achieved.