When a year before covid, Barcelona Global launched a project called Barcelona Overture to showcase the musical excellence that the city was experiencing beyond the borders thanks to the billboards at the Liceu, the Palau de la Música Catalana and L’Auditori, there were those who thought that this idea of ??organizing a Spring Festival in the month of March that would attract the attention of quality cultural tourism would not catch on in the Mediterranean capital of sun and beach and that, on the other hand, there would not be enough public among the people of Barcelona themselves to respond to such an atomized classical offer.
Five years and a pandemic later, the health of the Barcelona Obertura Spring Festival is proven incontestable, as are the possibilities of gradually changing the unilateral image that foreigners have of it as a low-cost tourism hub. And although the task of attracting music-loving visitors from Europe has not yet had a palpable effect – due in part to the interruption that Covid caused in mobility – it has become evident that the initiative has fueled an unusual fever for music. classic among the local public. And proof of this is that this Monday, an ordinary working day that was also preceded by the Cap butaca buida campaign – and its corresponding sold out on Saturday, in theaters throughout Catalonia -, the three large classical theaters in the city coincided, filling at the same time its capacity at 90%.
Almost six thousand people had mobilized to attend either the second performance of The Messiah at the Liceu, or the exceptional concert by Ádám Fischer and the Dusseldorf Symphony with Mahler’s 5th that programmed the Ibercamera season at L’Auditori, or the new presence of the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists in the Palau 100 cycle, offering Israel in Egypt, another Handelian oratorio (even without John Eliot Gardiner on the podium).
The entourage of international journalists that Barcelona Obertura has invited to this edition of the Spring Festival had not imagined for a second that the sunny capital of Gaudí’s architecture, Barça and sangria on the beach had such a fan of classical music.
“Nine performances of an oratorio like The Messiah is something unthinkable, not even in Germany,” exclaimed the editor of the culture section of Die Tageszeitung, the main Swiss newspaper, who had never set foot at the Liceu before. Also for the majority it was their first time at the Palau when on Sunday they attended the Passion according to Saint John officiated by Jordi Savall, whose serene demeanor left them overwhelmed. And obviously they did not know that L’Auditori has been standing for 25 years when this Monday they entered the bombastic acoustics of the room, with Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and Mahler’s 5th conducted by an incredible Ádám Fischer.
The Hungarian maestro, the last great exponent of the old and extraordinary school of orchestral conducting of the East, offered in the first part that unionist Haydn, a Symphony no. 45 composed so that the musicians gradually disappeared from the stage, until only two violins remained. An indirect way of telling Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, in that summer of 1772, that the musicians had the right to return to their homes during the vacation period and stop being locked up in the royal summer residence, 45 km away. from Eisenstadt Palace.
From there the Dusseldorf Symphony jumped into the Malherian romanticism of 1900 in the second part of the concert. The intensity and vehemence of the bohemian composer in the first movements of his famous 5th Symphony led to this Adaggieto that Luchino Visconti would relentlessly popularize in Death in Venice (1971) and that in the hands of Ádám Fischer reached sublime levels of thrill, without sweeteners.
“You can’t let it spread, that movement can get out of hand at any moment and you shouldn’t allow it,” commented the historic batonist after her highly applauded performance. The audience at L’Auditori had given him a four-minute ovation after his Malherian tour de force.
“Mahler wants 200 percent of you, of each musician. He demands so much that the performers get nervous, they get excited, and it is my task to calm them down and reposition them so that the piece comes to fruition. It is a singular effort,” he added, still brimming with electricity. “Now I’m going to Zaragoza to do the second act of Tristan und Isolde. Do you know that some batonists died conducting this piece? Mottl, Keilberth… It’s not that I’m afraid of dropping dead, but… it requires a lot of effort,” he says. almost joking, that brief man with a kind and generous countenance who has to look up when he is introduced to the consul general of Germany in Barcelona, ??Dirk Rotenberg.
Ádám Fischer has worked another beautiful miracle within the walls of L’Auditori, whose acoustics excite him. He masters it perfectly, without allowing the brass to sound strident, letting the penetrating contradictory phrasing of the string section expand in the perfect setting of the room. All the Mahlerian obsessions and anxieties ride with their bridles firmly in hand… when this man in the tailcoat – here, literally – takes up residence on the podium.
Congratulations Mr. Fischer, congratulations Barcelona.
