Barça was already losing against Athletic Bilbao in the first minute of the Copa del Rey quarter-final match when at the Palau de la Música Catalana people proudly treated themselves to an Aranjuez Concerto, the one that never disappoints. It was one of the four pieces - four pieces from the late 19th and early 20th centuries - that the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra would offer at the Palau de la Música Catalana, in the last concert of its tour of Spain with the Croatian guitarist Ana Vidović. Barcelona could choose between spending the night conceding four goals from the opponent or doing so enjoying a perfect forward: Granados, Rodrigo, Stravinski and Falla, in that order.
The Ibercamera season was close to being sold out at the modernist venue with 22% of the tourist audience attracted by the magical Aranjuez. On the podium was maestro Jordi Francés, a Valencian ("almost Catalan", he said) who is common in the country's main opera houses, although equally versed in symphony.
Thus, before Barcelona's television players came out to sweat their shirts, Francés was already trying hard to convey to the audience everything that Enric Granados's Valsos poètics threatens, the work with which he opened fire. Although there were some attendees who declared themselves "bewildered" by the orchestration of what was one of the composer's favorite works from Ilerda, a creation from his youth that he included in many of his recitals, also in New York that fateful 1916 in which he would die returning from the Big Apple when his ship was bombed.
Ana Vidovic would then come on stage with her guitar to offer the legendary plucking of the adagio from the Aranjuez Concerto, which Joaquín Rodrigo had written in 1939, in Braille, like all his works, since he was blind since he was three years old due to diphtheria. as the musician and writer David Puertas explained in the hand program. The audience could not contain themselves and applauded for a long time before Francés could continue with the third part, the final Allegro gentile.
In his role as solo guitarist, Vidović offered a "sweet" version, in the words of some attendees, with pianissimi served at discretion that, things as they are, persisted in the public's memory. "I liked her the most," said a woman at the end of the concert, after two hours of music. And she was in luck, because the president of Ibercamera, Josep Maria Prat, confessed the plans he has for the artist next season: Vivaldi and some Schubert impromtus.
The second part in charge of the formation led by Jordi Francés had consisted of this Pulcinella. Suite that Igor Stravinsky composed for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and that premiered in Paris in 1920 with costumes and sets by Picasso and a plot that went back to the comedy dell'arte. The Hungarian Philharmonic unleashed its unequivocal Faustian sound there and revealed, under the halo of musical neoclassicism, the iconoclastic background of the Russian avant-garde composer.
And also by Pablo Picasso were the sets for the ballet The Three-cornered Hat that Manuel de Falla premiered in London in 1919, a year before. This energetic score concluded the Ibercamera musical evening that took place in the Palau, oblivious to the future of Barcelona and the football classification. From the first floor of the Palau de la Música hall, Riccardo Frizza had followed the concert, who, in addition to being an expert in Italian opera, is in the city working on rehearsals for Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, which the Liceu premieres on February 9 -, he is also chief conductor of the Hungarian Radio Orchestra, which would become a first cousin of the group that occupied the stage. A musical dream team that surpasses, on this occasion, the sports team.
