Gustavo Dudamel hurries his last stage in front of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and takes the opportunity to perform for the first time with the formation in Barcelona; the Balthasar Neumann Chor
Everything indicates that the Palau de la Música Catalana continues to be at the forefront of the classical music scene. For the 2023-24 season, he has designed a Palau 100 cycle with twelve concerts that combine the presence of renowned conductors and legendary orchestras with that of ensembles that have emerged in the last thirty years at the hands of charismatic conductors, such as Thomas Hengelbrock or Raphäel. Pichon, the best when it comes to historically informed interpretation.
Half of these twelve concerts -ten in subscription and two extraordinary ones- include the participation of choirs, a very unusual percentage in symphony halls, because as the general director of the hall, Joan Oller, explains, "it adds a logistical difficulty to production, both on the go and in rehearsal conditions, is difficult, but we consider it an extra value. It is part of our DNA to present the best choirs and bet on programs with choral participation".
To start, the Ensemble Pygmalion choir of young but already renowned music director Raphäel Pichon will open the cycle with an unusual Mozart Requiem truffled with fragments of the Gregorian liturgy and other works from the Salzburg genius’s catalog linked to the idea of death . . . . Another notable choral formation visiting the House of the Cants will be the French formation Accentus, who together with Laurence Equilbey’s Insula Orchestra will bring a Händel Messiah for Christmas.
And the Orfeó Català and the Cor de Cambra del Palau will join the voices of Balthasar Neumann directed by Hengelbrock in a capital work of the great classical repertoire such as A German Requiem by Brahms. And also in Symphony no. 2 Mendelssohn's Lobgesang that will perform the same formations in this intensive week of February 2024 in which the German formation will open some rehearsals to the public and take the music where it normally does not arrive -residences, hospitals, civic centers- with small chamber concerts.
On the other hand, the Cor Jove del Orfeó will join the production of La Creación de Haynd that the OBC plans to take to the Palau with its main guest conductor, the Polish Marta Gardolinska. Which already adds up to two female directors in this edition of Palau 100. And there is a third, also Polish Anna Sulkowka-Migon, the winner of the last edition of the La Maestra competition organized by the Philharmonie de Paris. She will conduct the ensemble of the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana in Mahler's El corno mágico de juventud, with baritone Andrè Schuen as soloist.
But the legendary formations, all of them Anglo-Saxon, will star in the highlights of the symphony: Pappano, who has dedicated the last few years to the musical direction of the Royal Opera House in London, will appear after two decades of absence at the Palau at the head of the London Symphony with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Richard Strauss's great work of which the general public knows the mythical beginning with the also mythical 2001. A Space Odyssey. Alice Sara Ott, the German-Japanese pianist who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis six years ago, will accompany him in a complex piece like Liszt's 'Tontetanz'.
