The classical world has gone crazy before the extraordinary orchestral sap of maestro Klaus Mäkelä. Having just turned 28, the Finnish baton is today the most disputed on the international scene. And his long-awaited Barcelona debut will take place, without further delay, next season, in the Palau 100 cycle. And not with the Paris Orchestra of which he is the principal, but with the Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the Dutch group that has given the bell when signing him four years from now, starting in 2027. Of such magnitude is the teaching promise of this artist, the youngest star on the podium since Gustavo Dudamel emerged two decades ago, from the Venezuelan System. Get out your agendas: it will be January 26, 2025. And with a great program: Wagner’s Idyll of Siegfried and Richard Strauss’s Life of a Hero.
The Palau 100 cycle that the modernist hall presented this Friday – along with the opera cycle and the great voices cycle – adds two more concerts compared to the last edition, among which stands out the one offered by another of the symphonic Ferraris on the planet, the Vienna Philharmonic. The orchestra opens the season on October 3 with its beloved Daniele Gatti, who will have already become head of the Staatskapelle Dresden, replacing Christian Thielemann. The Milanese maestro, who precisely had to leave his Concertgebouw podium before the pandemic, accused of having an ambiguous relationship with some of the women in the orchestra, has completely rebuilt his career and appears again in the ‘top five’ of batons preferred by musicians and the public.
And in this case with a program that is one hundred percent Russian, very demanding, and in which the sound of the strings of the Viennese group will shine: Apollon Musagète by Stravinsky and the Tenth Symphony by Shostakovich. “It is a proposal in which the Russian in exile contrasts with the Russian who stays, the one who criticizes from outside and the one who supports Stalinism,” comments the general director of the Palau de la Música Catalana, Joan Oller. a neoclassical work by Stravinsky, almost chamber, and then the 50 minutes of symphonic explosion, and also with the Tenth, the first one he wrote after Stalin’s death, so it is a liberation, and in fact he mocks him in “the second movement. And it is also the one that breaks the curse of the nine symphonies, the number at which all the great composers since Beethoven had stopped.”
The Bruckner year will have a high point with the presence of Teodor Currentzis and his MusicAeterna orchestra performing the unfinished Ninth Symphony by the Austrian composer, “the one that is missing in Barcelona and that we have not managed to make popular as one of the greats,” says Oller. It will be March 23. And a month later, on Sant Jordi’s Day, there will be another bombshell concert marked by the return of John Eliot Gardiner (this time yes) with a 100% Mozart program that includes the Prague Symphony.
The brilliant British director has finally taken an entire year off after the violent outburst he had last year with one of his singers during a summer performance. And he will not disembark only with his English Baroque Soloists. He will come well supported by the soloists of the Concerto for Two Pianos in E flat major, none other than Maria João Pires and Kristian Bezuidenhout. The Portuguese pianist has become fascinated at her age – it is never too late – by the fortepiano, an instrument of which the Australian performer is a specialist.
The Palau will receive a double visit from the maestro (and Air France pilot) Daniel Harding, who will attend with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia that has just appointed him as its principal, conducting the 1st. by Mahler (May 5) with Joshua Bel in Dovrák’s Violin Concerto and, three weeks later (May 26), with the Swedish Radio Symphony and the 2nd Symphony, Resurrection. This event will put an end to the Palau 100 cycle, with the participation of the Orfeó Català, which will go on tour to Stockholm afterwards.
Returning to Bruckner, the Palau is excited to schedule Pablo Heras-Casado again in a concert “that was already agreed upon before he triumphed with Parsifal in Bayreuth,” says Oller, and which will be held (October 29 of this year) with the select historicist ensemble Anima Aeterna Brugge, with which the Granada maestro often collaborates. Together with them he will perform Bruckner’s 3rd plus Mahler’s Rückert lieder, in the voice of the English mezzo Sarah Connolly.
And continuing with national batons, Gustavo Gimeno returns to the Palau, a director who has created a very good relationship with the Orfeó Català (they have toured and recorded). His visit, on November 4, will coincide with his farewell tour of the Luxembourg Philharmonic, before assuming the musical direction of the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Toronto Symphony. On the programme, Gershwin’s jazzy Piano Concerto with Denis Kozhukhin (who has it recorded), and a Roman festival by Respighi, with Feste romane and Pini di Roma.
“We will do the two Beethoven masses. Philippe Herreweghe will conduct the Mass in C, which is the one that is not usually done, because even though it was very beautiful, it was not successful at its premiere: those who expected a mass by Haydn found it too modern and those who “They were expecting a revolution, they found it too classical. It is good to claim it with the Collegium Vocale Gent,” explains the general director of the hall about this concert on November 21. The other mass, the Solemnis, will be given by Thomas Hengelbrock and by Balthasar Neumann (March 10).
An essential appointment will be with the American director Marin Alsop, a veteran who has paved the way and broken the glass ceiling. He will lead the London Philharmonia in the Suite from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, and will feature as a soloist the young and extraordinary violinist from Granada María Dueñas (third time performing at Palau 100) in Korngold’s Concerto in D. They will also perform a contemporary piece by New Yorker Jessie Montgomery.
In the early music section, Palau 100 opts for Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, this time from the hand of tenor and maestro Emiliano González Toro, a specialist in Monteverdi (in the fall he released a capital recording of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria together to Philippe Jaroussky). The Swiss-Chilean artist, whom the Palau’s artistic director, Mercedes Conde, fervently defends, will demonstrate his chef-chanteur interpretive approach at the head of his Ensemble I Gemelli, the ensemble he founded in 2018. And the Palau will He is also happy that he did not hesitate to count on the main Catalan voices for this repertoire for this concert on February 17, 2025: Núria Rial and Xavier Sabata.
To these 12 subscription concerts are added two extraordinary concerts that the cycle will have: Herreweghe and the Orchester des Champs Élysées in Beethoven’s Symphonies 4 and 7 and a commitment to Rufus Wainwright, with the Spanish premiere of his Dream requiem, a co-production with L ‘Auditori, Philharmonique Radio France (where it will have premiered shortly before), Helsinki Philharmonic and Covent Garden, among others. The OBC directed by Ludovic Morlot will perform alongside the Orfeó and the soprano Anna Prohaska. And the actress and singer Najwa Nimri will participate in the recital.
The Palau Òpera cycle, which reaches its fourth edition, maintains the three titles and incorporates one by a Catalan author, the Giuseppe riconosciuto by Domènec Terradellas that the maestro Dani España premiered with Vespres d’Arnadí at the Torroella Festival. “And we will also have a Vivaldi, for which we will collaborate again with the Accademia Bizantina of Ottavio Dantone because we reaffirm that they are the best in this composer,” says the Palau’s deputy artistic director. This is Il Giustino, in the voices of Emöke Baráth or Delphine Galou, among others.
Händel’s Tamerlano in the hands of René Jacobs and the Freiburger Barockorchester will be the third and solid title that the Palau offers in concert version, “with singers who are not known here but who deserve to be presented, such as the excellent countertenor Paul-Antoine Bénos- They say,” says Conde.
And as far as the Palau Grans Veus is concerned, the cycle is well equipped. Starting with an inaugural concert by Juan Diego Flórez with his Sinfonía por el Perú (21/IX) and a collaboration with the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation that wants to reproduce the liederabend that the Barcelona soprano made with her good friend Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. “Here we have also brought together two friends, Iréne Theorin and Sarah Connolly, with Julius Drake on the piano.”
Jaroussky also returns, in lieder by Mozart, Haydn and Schubert, and repeats the famous trio formed by Jonas Kaufmann, Diana Damrau and the pianist Helmut Deutsch, singing Strauss and Mahler. The young Barcelona soprano Serena Sáenz will also sing, with Vespres d’Arnadí, with whom she got along so well last year in Peralada, and the great figure of the Schubertíada, the baritone Andrè Schuen, will close.
