Wednesday 03 December, 2025

Standing ovations for the Basque National Orchestra at L'Auditori de Barcelona

Following a two and a quarter hour concert, the Basque National Orchestra received standing ovations from its Barcelona audience on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for its concerts paying homage to Ravel, revealing Sorozabal and plunging into the demanding and great Mahler.

The concert programme was presented as the best musical proposal for an orchestra to fulfil its dual role while touring as acting as a cultural ambassador while showing its solid position in the universal repertoire on its tours.

The concerts began, to almost full halls, with the Alborada del gracioso by Ravel, a Basque yet universal composer, to commemorate him on the 150^th anniversary of his birth while at the same time, sharing its complicity with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia (OBC), in its exchange with the Basque National Orchestra, to symbolise the union of both orchestras on both sides of the Pyrenees.

This was followed by Pablo Sorozabal and his Siete Lieder, a work written by the Basque composer during his German period, which includes poems by Heinrich Heine translated into Basque by José Arregi. The Siete Lieder are a selection of these poems in song form. sung in Basque and dedicated to outstanding figures of Basque culture. In this work, Sorozabal merges the German tradition with the rhythms and modulations of Basque folklore, and the Navarrese soprano Sofía Esparza, with the lyrical beauty of her voice, took them and made them her own, for their finest interpretation. From the first song 'Amesetan' to the seventh 'Agertu yatan orriya', Esparza sweetly highlighted the enormous quality of these seven poems, a revelation for the Catalan public.

Following the interval came Mahler's ever-demanding, colourful Fifth. This symphony, with its autobiographical connotations, spans all the emotional states of a composer on the verge of death throughout its almost 70 minutes: from the initial trumpet solo that intones a funeral march to its triumphant finale with its idea of reaching the 'awakening', Mahler navigates despair, melancholy, optimism and even a declaration of love, the latter identified in the renowned Adagietto heard in Death in Venice. The Basque National Orchestra is highly familiar with this symphony, having performed it on its international tours and also, a few days before travelling to Barcelona, in the Vitoria and Pamplona Symphony Season. All the sections of the orchestra led by their soloists, with a special mention to the trumpet soloist Alberto Romero and the horn soloist Adrián García Carballo, were brought together in a compact musical body which solvently and soundly defended Mahler's famous, brilliant Fifth, conducted by Antonio Méndez.

Interesting exchanges

Following the concerts, the General Director of the OBC, Víctor Medem, and his counterpart in the Basque National Orchestra, Roberto Ugarte, agreed on the interest this type of exchange holds, both for the orchestras and their musicians and for the public who listen to them.