Performers from a golden generation of classical music will land in Barcelona in the coming days, confirming that, with the help of its emblematic venues, such as the Palau de la Música Catalana, the city continues to position itself as the musical capital of Southern Europe.
The famous Anne-Sophie Mutter returns this Thursday to the modernist room offering a classic and contemporary look at the string quartet, a proposal that was canceled due to the pandemic and for which she is accompanied by three young people deservedly sponsored by herself: the violinist Ye-Eun Choi, the violist Vladimir Babeshko and the Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández. With them she premieres in Spain the Study on Beethoven quartet dedicated to her by Jörg Widmann.
For his part, the pianist Dezsö Ránki (Budapest, 1951) inaugurates on Monday 24, in the same auditorium, the Ibercamera Season with the only Bach concert (in D minor) that at 71 years of age he had not yet had the opportunity to address. Ránki is now studying it expressly to lead the Orquestra Da Camera.
It is interesting to remember that Ránki was part of that trio of young pianists from Aquincense –along with Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff– who amazed the classical world with their Bach in the seventies of the cold war. “The three drank from two influences: one was Sviatoslav Richter, whose first concert in Budapest was a public fiasco… until the second part. People wanted to boycott the one they considered the next interpreter imposed by Moscow, but during the break they Word spread and the second one didn’t fit a pin.
The other great influence for these young musicians was Glenn Gould, who came to the East cutting radically with the romanticized interpretation of Bach keyboard music, something that greatly impressed these three young people and laid the foundations for what would come later.
The Da Camera formation, a tribute to those exceptional musicians –from the Casals, Quiroga, Gerhard, Cosmos quartets– who have changed the destiny of chamber music in Catalonia and the rest of Spain, will also perform Mendelssohn’s Symphony for Strings No. 13 and Schönberg’s Transfigured Night, known as the last great work of Romanticism.
Finally, the Franz Schubert Filharmonia opens its season this weekend (Friday in Vila-Seca, Saturday in Sant Cugat and Sunday at the Palau de la Música) with Ivo Pogorelich. The piano legend of Serbian origin will play –always in his own way– Concerto no. 2 by Chopin. Tomàs Grau, the director of the Catalan formation, will complete the program directing also the 7th of Dvorák.
