Teodor Currentzis will spend up to three times with his MusicAeterna orchestra in Barcelona next year, two of them within the Ibercamera seasons and, as announced two weeks ago, another in Palau 100. The news comes after the overwhelming shower of perfection that the Greek-Russian maestro offered this Monday at L’Auditori with a Mozart Requiem that registered an absolute sell-out, which predicts new public successes when in a year, on March 23, 2025, the Bruckner year is celebrated with his 9th Symphony at the Palau de la Música and when the next day he tackles Mahler’s monumental 2nd Symphony at L’Auditori, with the Barcelona native Mireia Barrera leading the Cor Ibercamera. But Currentzis is already planning to return with Beethoven in November 2025…
“The first idea was that in the 2024-25 season he would perform Beethoven’s Symphonies in one room and in the other,” explains Josep Maria Prat, president of Ibercamera, “but it turned out that around this time he was doing other types of programs, Mahler and Bruckner, “So it didn’t make sense for him to interrupt that work to put the orchestra into Beethoven. He proposed the change to us and we thought it was magnificent. But he also asked us to schedule Beethoven for November.”
The strong side of the menu that Ibercamera has designed for its 41st season in Barcelona continues to be a cultural bridge with Russia. Apart from Currentzis, the great exponent of the new Russian piano music, Daniil Trifonov, returns, whom Ibercamera has followed since he was a kid. On this occasion he performs at the Palau de la Música works by Tchaikovsky (the Sleeping Beauty suite), waltzes by Chopin and a sonata by Barber.
Also by Tchaikovsky, the 5th will be played by the WDR Colonia Symphony conducted by the new head of the Oper Köln, Andrés Orozco Estrada, a Colombian maestro that Ibercamera plans to bet on, programming it every year from now on. The program for this event at L’Auditori (February 24) includes Schumann’s Cello Concerto, with Pablo Ferrández as soloist.
But the bridges with Russia will be felt from the inaugural concert, on November 11, 2025, for which Ibercamera proposes a Russian-Finnish program, neighboring countries, with the 2nd by Sibelius, a composer in which the Helsinki Philharmonic is a specialist, and the Piano Concerto no. 3 by Rachmaninov, played by Nelson Goerne.
Another pianist, Sir András Schiff, will attend (January 22) in his double role as conductor and soloist with the Capella Andrea Barca, the orchestra he created to offer the repertoire that excites him most. Bach and Mozart will perform: the Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 and the Triple Concerto in A minor of the first, and the piano concertos no. 24 and 25 of the second.
Another music legend, the Belgian maestro Philippe Herreweghe who is so often seen in the Palau’s programming, will make his debut on Ibercamera with the Collegium Vocale Gent (January 29). “We knew of his desire to make his Bach sound with the acoustics of L’Auditori, an artistic and acoustic curiosity to which we happily indulged,” says Prat.
The other three concerts of the season (which still do not have any extraordinary ones) will be with the Orquestra Da Camera promoted by Ibercamera with the members of the Quartet Casals, a formation to which on this occasion (March 21, 2025) the Croatian guitarist will join Ana Vidovic in Boccherini’s Fandango Quintet and in Vivaldi’s RV 93 Guitar Concerto.
At L’Auditori, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which was just heard at the Palau, will be played again in the BCN Clàssics cycle – “surely we would have to coordinate better between the classical seasons, although in our case it is a cancellation due to an illness that we now recover” – and which this time will be heard (May 5) by the Galician Symphony Orchestra conducted by its new director, Roberto González-Monjas, also responsible for the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. And finally, on June 4, the Vienna Symphony will close the cycle with Petr Popelka at the baton (Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier) and violinist Renaud Capuçon in the Mendelssohn Concerto.
The budget for the season is one million euros. Patrons such as the Fundació Vilacasas continue to participate in the project at the express wish of the deceased patron, Antoni Vilacasas. Ibercamera’s global ticket revenue has increased by 26.20% (they have sold 2,742 more tickets to date than in the 39th season) and season tickets by 11.89%. Today they go on sale. Individual tickets, on May 22.
