Palau de la Música Catalana choirs join Dudamel’s NY Phil tour, palaumusica.cat says
The choral ensembles of the Palau de la Música Catalana will join conductor Gustavo Dudamel for his inaugural European tour leading the New York Philharmonic, featuring ten concerts across six cities from October 9 to October 22, palaumusica.cat reported.
The Orfeó Català, the Cor de Noies de l’Orfeó Català, and singers from the Cor Infantil will participate in five of these performances. The collaboration centers on John Adams’s Sobre la transmigración de las almas, a piece composed in 2002 to honor the victims of the September 11 attacks.
Ten Concerts Across Six European Capitals
The tour opens on October 10 at the Philharmonie de París, marking the second concert of the New York Philharmonic’s broader European itinerary under Dudamel. The orchestra travels to Barcelona on October 12 to open the 11th season of BCN Classics in a coproduction with L’Auditori. Performances follow at the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid on October 13, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg on October 19, and the Musikverein in Vienna on October 22.
The Vienna concert marks a historical milestone for the Orfeó Català, as the choirs perform for the first time inside the hall that broadcasts the traditional New Year’s Concert. A group of approximately thirty Orfeó Català patrons will travel with the ensembles to Paris to attend the opening performance of the choral collaboration.
A Shared Legacy and Twentieth-Anniversary Program
The tour coincides with Dudamel’s first season as the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, a position he assumed in September. In a press release issued by the organization, Dudamel described the significance of taking the ensemble to Europe.
“These cities and these concert halls are spaces where much of the music we perform was created, imagined and transformed. Sharing this legacy with an orchestra whose own history is so closely linked to it is a profound privilege.”
The program featuring the Palau de la Música Catalana choirs includes John Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, performed in recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks. The composition shares the program with the European premiere of Invisible House by Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri and Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5.
Building International Choral Precedent
This deployment follows prior international appearances by the Orfeó Català with Dudamel, including a performance in Los Angeles alongside the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The current tour introduces the Cor de Noies and the Cor Infantil to the configuration alongside the adult Orfeó Català.
The New York Philharmonic’s return to Europe marks its first visit to the continent in nearly a decade and its first tour in Spain in almost fifteen years. The collaborative concerts conclude in Vienna on October 22.