You have had work performed and have worked at some of Barcelona's great venues—tell me what your favourite one has been and a little bit about the new Conservatori del Liceu?
I have to say that the Palau de la Música Catalana is a real favourite hall for me. It is beautiful and architecturally striking, has an excellent acoustic and it really represents in many ways the heart and soul of Catalan music making.
The Conservatori del Liceu is an important Barcelona musical institution, and it is the only private conservatori superior in all of Spain. It is important that it exists and flourishes in Barcelona. The fact that they have inaugurated their new building with a beautiful concert hall dynamises the music scene here even more.
The concert in Barcelona will be an interactive performance—what are the reasons behind this and do you think it will be successful in attracting new audiences to the genre?
It is important for us to work with other mediums such as dance, film or poetry. It is enormously stimulating and this makes contemporary music accessible to so many more listeners and new audiences. As dedicated performers of contemporary music, we are behooved to reach out to the public in as many ways as conditions allow us to. Audience building is accomplished one concert at a time, meaning that if we can attract some new listeners to our concerts, the only possibility we have of satisfying them is if we offer a sufficiently varied and stimulating programming so as to make it worth while to get out, buy a ticket and come to our concerts again. That is a business principal that we can't ignore. It is a challenge.
I think that if we continue to program as we have been doing, with dance in one concert, film in another, the traditional cobla instruments, and other elements, we can contribute to transforming the perception of contemporary music. It will start to be perceived more as an inclusive art form, and not an exclusive one apt only for those who are already initiated. Clearly, the already initiated, small but avid contemporary music public is important to us, but just as important are the newcomers who we are going after with our concerts too.
What other work are you involved with at the moment; what are your future musical plans?
Grup21 keeps me very occupied every fall especially when we have our fall concert series. Putting together three or four different programs of new music, organising it and directing it, all so that things go smoothly and professionally, all that takes a lot of attention. Future plans are the continued growth of Grup21. We have a new CD coming out this fall and another two CDs in the planning. We have been creating a series of chamber concertos for each of the instruments of Grup21. This year we premier the fifth one for clarinet by Lleonard Balada. These new concertos are published by Dinsic Publicacions of Barcelona and we will be recording all of them. The next two years will bring the sixth and seventh concertos, thus completing the set of pieces. That is exciting to be bringing this project to fruition.
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