The Orchestra as a cultural-musical asset

Given the importance of creating synergies which enrich its contribution to the world of culture, completing the Basque National Orchestra activity is a wide-ranging catalogue of concerts in connection with important festivals and other cultural events and institutions. This capacity for adapting to each of the musical formats programmed enables the Orchestra to relate with audiences of different styles, interests and ages, hence its ability to reach a total of 150,000 spectators every season.

The 2017/2018 Season Concerts have the important presence of a new chief conductor, Robert Treviño. He opens and closes the season and will direct six concert programmes. This important presence means that his first Season already bears his stamp and his personality.

Treviño has designed a programme which, as well as inviting people to discover the enormous symphony sound, offers a look at concepts such as resistance, conflict and reconciliation based on the musical experience of Britten and Shostakovich: two composer friends, yet from two opposite sides of Europe who, through their music, constantly express the need for peace, the desire to go deeper into human empathy and to give a voice to those who don't have one. The centenary of the Russian Revolution will be one of the central arguments of the new season programme. It will have, for example, a great deal of the more politically committed Shostakovich who, through his Symphony no. 11, pays tribute to the victims who tried to rebel against the Tsarist regime in 1905. In this combination of symbols and ideas we will have the figure of Britten, by whom we will perform three works from 1939, turned into a cry for peace.

This season the Music room Concerts are directly related to the Season Concerts: Beethoven and his immortal pastoral symphony, Britten and his compositions dedicated to childhood, and Shostakovich, here in his more playful aspect and with almost light music, are some of the composers who will sound out most in the concerts. We will premiere three of our own productions: "Soinuekin jolasean", "Pierrot" and "Beethoven: Pastorala".

The image of this season, recognisable and commonplace, yet at the same time surprising and suggestive, encompasses the spirit of the Miramón Matinées. Because that’s what the Basque National Orchestra's chamber concert season is like: a classic in weekend musical proposals which innovates nonstop with an extensive catalogue of sounds, endless perfumes and melodic shapes that create an evocative story.

In the 2017/2018 season, this heterogeneous posy of proposals is made up of the contemporary choir music of Kantika Korala, the solo piano of Judith Jáuregui, the jazz of Ainara Ortega and Iñaki Salvador, L’Histoire du Soldat by Stravinsky and Ramuz performed by a chamber orchestra composed of Orchestra musicians and narrated by Andoni Alemán, as well as a series of rendezvous with small groups giving rise to binomials like Turina and Brahms or Philipp Glass and Shostakovich.