It was an expected return for maestro Riccardo Chailly at the Palau de la Música Catalana. Especially since his presence in a room that doesn't have its own orchestra is always synonymous with a great landing. And in this case, in the case of the musical director of La Scala, the visit to Barcelona of the Milanese Theater Philharmonic this first Monday in October was more than an event: it was a debt.
It is true that current affairs oblige, and that all eyes are now on Italian politics, but since this orchestra has not been to the Palau since the 1990s –Muti conducted it in 1991, and previously it came with Lorin Maazel, in 1986– , and that Barcelona remembered her exultantly in a Macbeth in concert directed by Muti himself at the Liceu, in 2001, European geo-concerns were left aside and the crowd that packed the hall has focused on the musical task.
The program was comfortable: the lively Symphony no. 1 by Beethoven – which began as a conservatory sound and intensified as it progressed – and the groundbreaking no. 1 by Mahler, an author closely linked to the career of this Milanese master, whose last name dates back to Napoleonic France. He himself recognized that his vocation as his baton arose when he was eleven years old listening to that first symphony. And in the nineties, he signed the integral during his stage at the head of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra...
Tonight Chailly has put the public in his pocket, perhaps because of his martial way of stopping the 99 musicians of the orchestra, whom he has walked through the different Mahlerian ambiguities with uneven luck. Brilliance and lyricism disputed the evening without it being clear who won in the ring. Chailly had brought the podium, whose railing covered in red velvet, matching the covers of the scores, appealed to the pedigree of the orchestra and its theater. The one at La Scala, elegant, with that art of living an Italian existence...
The Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, the Secretary of Culture, Jordi Foz, the general director of cultural promotion, Josep Vives, and Vinyet Panyella, president of Conca, attended the grand opening of Palau 100. And they celebrated it at the after party before the artists attended the reception of their country's consulate at the end of their Spanish tour.
