This weekend the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra closes the season with ‎guest conductor Vasily Petrenko and mezzo-soprano Nancy ‎Fabiola Herrera. ‎

In September, Petrenko is set to become Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra ‎in London and Principal Conductor of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Russian ‎Federation. He returns to conduct the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra once again, offering ‎Anton Webern’s arrangement of the Ricercar from The Musical ‎Offering by Johann Sebastian Bach, Symphony No. 5 in D, “The Reformation” by Felix ‎Mendelssohn and Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, which will ‎be sung by mezzo-soprano Nancy Fabiola Herrera.‎

This will be the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra’s final concert this season, although there will ‎be an extraordinary concert for season-ticket holders on 25 June and from ‎‎1 to 15 July the Orchestra will be taking part in L’Auditori’s Mozart Summer ‎Nights event.‎

‎Felix Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony was composed in honour of the ‎‎300th anniversary of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession (1530), the ‎first official declaration of the guiding principles of Lutheranism. Mendelssohn was a keen ‎student of Baroque music, especially that of Johann Sebastian Bach, and this symphony can ‎be seen as a heartfelt tribute to the composer’s moral and religious principles. The work ‎suggests a programmatic structure that traces the development of Lutheranism in Germany, ‎through the inclusion of various chorales and hymns, including Johann Gottlieb Naumann’s ‎‎Dresden Amen and Ein feste Burg is unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress ‎is Our God), by Luther himself.‎

In 1922, Arnold Schoenberg created a version for chamber orchestra of ‎one of his Gurre-Lieder, composed between 1900 and 1911, ‎to accompany his Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9. This version, which moves ‎away from references to the earlier lieder on which the score is constructed, shifts the focus ‎onto the motivic work of variation and combination, achieving a form which is “almost a ‎sonata”, according to the composer.‎

In one of his few orchestral works, Anton Webern, a disciple of Schoenberg and a leading ‎light in twentieth-century avant-garde music, resurrects Johann Sebastian ‎Bach’s masterly six-voice fugue, The Musical ‎Offering.‎