L’Auditori opens its 25th anniversary season this Friday with innovative projects and undisputed events, such as the visit of Daniele Gatti with the Mahler Chamber or the comprehensive visit of Shostakovich by the Quartet Casals. And with a rejuvenated and talented OBC that faces its second year in the hands of Ludovic Morlot.
The French master teacher reappeared this Thursday with the hope of being able to show “as soon as possible” the first album of the Ravel ensemble that he recorded this summer with the Barcelona group and which, he assures, “will be magnificent.”
Morlot opens the course this Friday with an intense program that will be repeated all weekend: Beethoven’s Heroica, Joan Guinjoan’s Famfàrria, which is precisely the piece that inaugurated L’Auditori in 1999, plus Prokófiev’s Concertante Symphony in hands of a solid soloist, the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who will offer a tribute to the missing Jordi Cervelló: A song for Pau Casals.
“We have been overwhelmed rehearsing this Cervelló that involves the cellos and that has entered the program by surprise,” Morlot confessed this Thursday. “It is a very intimate work to play after this great Prokofiev. And it is dedicated to Casals, my hero, like that of so many cellists,” added the American soloist whose relationship with Morlot became evident.
“I am happy to work with my dear friend and great teacher Ludovic, with whom we already played this Prokofiev at the Aspen Festival eight years ago,” he noted. I learned this piece when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was passionate about that period and I played it in front of the public at 17. Its title is real, it is much more than a concert, it is a symphony with cello. But the cello shows all possible colors and emotions. “It’s like a wild night in a museum: each color is more vibrant than the last.”
At the peak of her career, this performer who made her European debut precisely with the OBC – “hence why this city and this orchestra are special” – had not returned home since just before the covid she performed Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. She will return in spring with the complete Beethoven Sonatas that she recorded in 2020 in San Diego, “with an empty room.”
Morlot recalled that Prokófiev started from his Cello Concerto premiered five years earlier, in 1938. “Later, a year before Stalin died in 1953, he wrote this Symphony that was more sarcastic and less dark than the Concerto.”
