What does the music of your life and your time say?

I am writing this Punyalada a few hours before L'Auditori inaugurates a new season with the first concert of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National of Catalonia, with the Palau de la Música stage warming up in anticipation of starting most of its most important cycles in October, and a few days before the Gran Teatre del Liceu raises the curtain with Ariadne auf Naxos, by Richard Strauss. The three main engines of classical music in Barcelona will thus begin their first post-covid season (if the stubborn little bug from Wuhan and its derivatives allow it) and the first thing that must be said is that their respective artistic management teams with Robert Brufau, Joan Oller and Mercedes Conde Pons, and Víctor Garcia de Gomar and Valentí Oviedo, respectively, deserve an applause prior to any levare for leading and representing their respective spaces in times of unprecedented complexity.

Any season opening, and even more so if we are talking about a public institution, is a declaration of principles. This weekend, L'Auditori presents a program that is not very coherent musically but interesting in terms of intentions, with a commissioned work from one of its two current resident authors (U, by Bernat Vivancos), the prominent presence of one of the rising stars of the classical world, the centennial cellist and royal wedding entertainer Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and the presence in the program of a totemic work of the symphonic repertoire such as Romeo and Juliet, by Prokofiev. L'Auditori thus links the work of a local composer to the stardom of the new fashionable instrumentalist and, in turn, returns to the OBC's music stands a work from the early 20th century but with a romantic spirit that is, after all, the usual center of gravity of the customary repertoire of most orchestras on the planet.

Robert Brufau has acted saintly by continuing the use of marking the season under a thematic axis (in this case, the emotional binomial LOVE/HATE), although, if I may be a nitpicker, I would say that if there is one thing we have too much of in this tribe, it is talking about emotions and perhaps we should start focusing a little more on rationality and living with our feet on the ground.

Amendments aside, grouping seasons into core ideas helps cultivate the notion that, beyond enjoyment or commercial entertainment, music is an art that expresses a philosophy, that generates thought, and that this thought unites the creation date of a musical piece with our untransferable present. And this is the great pending task of all our musical institutions which, for now and much to their chagrin, have failed in something as basic as explaining how musical tradition, and especially that which has been woven in Catalonia, can help us better understand the past and this elusive present of ours.

What I am writing is not a trivial metaphysical exercise. In recent years at the TNC, Xavier Albertí has shown that high occupancy rates can be achieved in a cultural institution by valuing Catalan dramaturgical tradition and linking it with contemporary works from the international scene. For yet another season, and there have been dozens, the Gran Teatre del Liceu neglects Catalan operatic heritage (which exists and had been a regular part of the coliseum's programming) and yes, it is true, it features local singers, but a minimal analysis of the different casts in this year's program shows that the country's voices are still placed in second and third repertoires (or even worse, they are assigned roles that even a deaf person knows are not suitable for their voice). That in 2021 our repertoire still rests dusty in libraries and archives should shame us.

As demonstrated by the very recent and controversial Met opening gala in New York and, if there is any art form that links music to the social and political concerns of the present, it is opera. The Liceu must program Strauss, Mozart, Debussy and so on, but its primary task as a public institution is to create an inquisitive audience that finds in the genre the answers imposed by its time. All opera lovers get excited about great voices, and we are all very eager to see how Goerne masters Wozzeck and how Minkowski ignites the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy.

But, I insist, the task of a public entity is to help connect music and citizens which, despite what anyone thinks, is done through programming where content and substance shine, and not by organizing podcasts where the tribe's influencers try to pump up our young people with four hackneyed topics to disguise ignorance.

The task of a public entity is to help connect music and citizens

I understand that both L'Auditori and Liceu have more difficulties in recovering in this task, given the disastrous artistic legacy of their previous artistic directors. In this sense, it is logical that the Palau de la Música is, for now, the stage where the most attractive concerts in the city take place.Mercedes Conde Pons was very skillful in taking advantage of the pandemic to notably expand the hiring of musicians from the country, emphasizing the power of KM0 (perhaps it would be opportune to finish it off with a more ambitious program of artistic residencies, why not!) and the Palau would act saintly and opportunely in taking advantage of the neglect of public institutions to integrate our soloists into the great programs of the house (just yesterday, pianist and mathematician Laura Farré Rozada demonstrated how an instrumentalist from the country could stand alongside the best orchestras on the planet without any complex).

Despite having significant budgets and large management teams, the country's musical infrastructures have not yet excelled in the task of overcoming the culture of entertainment to explain to Catalan music lovers what music (and specifically the music of their country) says about their life and their time. Apart from thinking about what we program on stage, we should dedicate a couple of neurons to seeing what audience we are interested in fostering.

We should dedicate a couple of neurons to seeing what audience we are interested in fostering

Barcelona will never be Vienna or Berlin, but its musical tradition, especially that of the early 20th century, can once again make it a benchmark for European music.Covid and the consequent time of confinement has taught us that, often, to understand the present one has to seclude oneself and think. Artistic directors, get to work and take risks, because if you don't, I fear that soon music will be a pure object of consumption... and rather reduced.