The Franz Schubert Filharmonia (FSF) has ended up becoming the private ambassador orchestra of Catalonia that is least subsidized by the Generalitat. After its successful debut at Carnegie Hall in New York at the beginning of the season, the group made up of Catalan musicians will travel to Dubai in 2025, invited by the International Music Festival of the city of the Arab Emirates. There they will give six concerts with six special programs, alternating throughout the two weeks of the festival with another symphony orchestra from Japan.
This was announced this Friday by Tomàs Grau, director and promoter of the internationalization of this orchestral project that emerged in Tarragona 18 years ago, when presenting its 2024-25 season at the Palau de la Música. “Dubai is trying to bring classical music in the Middle East to the level of Europe and is investing in it. The violinist Maxim Vengerov has been an ambassador for this event, attended by the greatest international figures,” says Grau. Four soloists and three yet-to-be-revealed conductors will perform with them at the Dubai Opera.
Vengerov will be precisely one of the renowned soloists that the FSF will have this next year at the Palau de la Música Catalana, with Concerts no. 1 and no. 3 by Mozart, after more than two decades without visiting Barcelona with an orchestra. Grau will have inaugurated the cycle on October 1 with the 5th. by Mahler, a musical epic that is the third symphony of the bohemian composer who faces the formation.
Grau has invited three batonists this time: the Frenchman Laurence Equilbey, founder of the Accentus choir and the Insula Orchestra, who will conduct Fauré’s Requiem with Núria Rial and José Antonio López as vocal soloists; Ton Koopman, who has chosen Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and who will have Alexandra Soumm on violin for two Bach concertos (the BWV 1056R was adapted by the composer himself from harpsichord to violin), and the Mexican Carlos Miguel Prieto, who will bring out the rhythms and the colors of American symphony in Márquez’s Danzón and Ginastera’s Concertante Variations. Prieto also proposed the American pianist Olga Kern for Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, a figure that Grau himself had had his eye on.
Also worth noting among the soloists is Saishin Kashimoto, concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, who together with cellist Alexander Chaushian will perform Brahms’ Double Concerto with Grau on the baton, in a program that will conclude with the rarely scheduled Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. The FSF invites Elisabeth Leonskaja again, this time solo, with the last three sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. And as a novelty, she proposes to do chamber music with the soloists of the group: they will play Mendelssohn’s Octet and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade, with the OBC concertmaster, Vlad Stanculeasa, as a guest.
The budget of the cycle amounts to half a million euros and that of the entire season – more than 50 concerts that include the cycles in Tarragona, Lleida, Sant Cugat and Vila-seca – amounts to two million euros of which only 17% corresponds to aid from the Government.
“We are reaching a good balance in the number of concerts. Now we would have to reach it also in guest artists and directors. We could do more but we lack the money. In 18 years of existence we have premiered 30 works by Catalan composers, 25 of them commissioned… but the Generalitat is convinced that this help is what we deserve. And we do not agree,” concludes Grau.
