Throughout the 2026-27 season, peace will resonate on many occasions, in a diversity of forms, voices, styles and composers, at the Palau de la Música Catalana. But we want this cry for peace, which is so necessary at the moment, to cross borders, as Pau Casals said, because “music […] transcends the borders of language, politics and nations. It goes directly to the soul”.
That is why the Palau de la Música Catalana continues with the aim of arousing this desire in the public with a broad and diverse programme that includes great international bands and performers, along with the country’s great artists. We will welcome the great conductors of the young generation, such as Tarmo Peltokoski, Klaus Mäkelä, Lorenzo Viotti or Raphaël Pichon, and established greats, such as Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Daniel Harding, John Eliot Gardiner, Daniele Gatti, Pablo Heras-Casado or Teodor Currentzis, as well as indisputable performers such as Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Gautier Capuçon, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Lisa Batiashvili, Cecilia Bartoli, Juan Diego Flórez, Nadine Sierra, Magdalena Kožená, Lang Lang, Yuja Wang or Víkingur Ólafsson and, to this list, we add the proper names of Jordi Savall, Josep Pons, Josep Maria Colom, Alba Ventura, the Casals Quartet and the Kebyart Saxo Quartet, resident formation.
We will widely celebrate Beethoven and Pau Casals, two standards of fraternity and freedom as essential values of the human condition and foundations of peace, but we will also remember on their centenary: Rosa Sabater, Manuel Cabero and Oriol Martorell, three great names who wrote the musical history of Catalonia. We are starting three long-term projects with the Complete Piano Sonatas by Mozart, the Complete String Quartets by Shostakovich and the complete organ works by J. S. Bach.
But in the more than two hundred concerts that make up the Palau’s own concert program, there will also be a lot of contemporary music and a lot of Catalan music. Eric Whitacre, Agustí Charles and Marian Márquez are guest composers and Antoni Soler will be a composer of Catalan heritage and, together with them, a long list of new creations, experimentation and recovery. The dialogue between the arts will continue to play a leading role in a house where it has been produced since its creation. Thus, we will have as guest artists the sculptor Lluís Cera, the digital artist Agnes Jonas, the poet Manuel Forcano and we will continue to collaborate with the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera and the Fundació Úniques.
With the conviction that “music constitutes a higher revelation than any philosophy”, to quote the words of Ludwig van Beethoven, this season wants to be, more than ever, a cry for peace, a vindication of the most fundamental values of human dignity when these are fading in a disoriented world, because, following the words of Pau Casals, “living is not enough; we must participate”.
May we never lack references, may we be able to find calm in the midst of confusion thanks to music, and may the Palau continue to be the space for meeting and communion of the most ephemeral and sublime art, because we continue to have the conviction that music can make people’s lives better.
