Tribute to Pau Casals

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Image courtesy of Palau de la Música Catalana.

A concert conceived ad hoc to pay tribute to the multifaceted figure of Pau Casals: cellist, conductor, composer and global musician, as well as a man of peace. An international reference in the world of the cello, a driving force behind a new way of understanding the instrument and a key figure in 20th-century Catalan culture, Casals also made music an expression of his ideals of fraternity, freedom and peace. In a season in which peace is precisely the guiding thread, it would be difficult to imagine a more inspiring figure with whom to open it. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the concert explores the different facets of his legacy through artists and ensembles with particularly close ties to his world: Pablo Ferrández, the first recipient of the Pau Casals Scholarship; the Casals Quartet; the Orfeó Català, the Escolania de Montserrat and the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès, conducted by Xavier Puig.

The program portrays Casals through music. His O vos omnes and Nigra sum reveal the composer and his connection with Montserrat; El cant dels ocells, in an arrangement by Bernat Vivancos, revisits the song that Casals made famous around the world; Schubert’s String Quintet recalls the importance of chamber music throughout his career, while Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, performed by Pablo Ferrández, evokes Casals’s decisive role in restoring the Suites to the concert repertoire. The journey culminates in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy,” closely associated with the ideals of fraternity, harmony and peace that Casals upheld throughout his life. It will be performed in Catalan, in Joan Maragall’s translation, reviving the same version that Casals conducted on the last occasion he performed the work in Catalunya.

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