“Aula Jordà Gela”: Basque National Orchestra+Musikene

Since launching the Institutional Preferential Collaboration Agreement in 2012 we have become two partner institutions with a raft of shared interests and goals, the most important of which is the educational and professional promotion of music. And here we both had a great deal to say. From that starting point we have organised several initiatives, all with very decent results. Outstanding among them is the Master’s Degree in Orchestral Studies and the Masterclasses given by our guest soloists.

Official Master’s Degree in Orchestral Studies

This is one of the stars of the Aula Jordá Gela Agreement. We are now in the 4th edition of a Degree with the leverage of being the only one of its kind to hold official status in Spain. The Master’s Degree has a great many virtues. It is well worth recalling the aspects entailed for students in orchestral placements:

• Students with an orchestra placement will join the body of a symphony orchestra of recognised prestige and will perform on the stages of its Concert Season: a season performed in the leading concert halls of Bilbao, San Sebastián, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Pamplona, and which has almost 7,000 subscribers.
• As an Orchestra member, the student will apply themselves, with top level conductors and soloists, to a symphony repertoire of paramount complexity.
• During their placement period, each student will have an Orchestra professor as their mentor.
• An Orchestra placement offers a unique experience in as much as the student becomes fully integrated to the real world of an orchestra.

Masterclasses

Our Orchestra always has eminent guest soloists on its programme. Their presence in our activity constitutes an opportunity for students from Musikene to take advantage of and learn first-hand about their vision of music, always from the perspective made possible by a successful trajectory of recognised international prestige. Since the Aula Jordá Gela was launched, the list of artists who have offered to give masterclasses has grown, and greatly so. Among them are the pianists Joaquín Achúcarro, Nicholas Angelich, and Nikolai Lugansky, the violinist Julian Rachlin, Dmitri Makhtin and Simone Lamsma, the cellists Johannes Möser, Enrico Dindo and Gerard Albrecht, the trumpetists Hakan Hardenberger or the voices of Susanne Elmark and Aquiles Machado.