On Wednesday 29 April, the Barcelona Symphony Band presents a preview of its latest album ‎with an arrangement of the traditional El cant dels ocells, a piece from Vuit ‎Cançons Populars Catalanes (Eight Catalan Folksongs) by Miquel Asins Arbó. The ‎première will be streamed on L’Auditori’s Facebook page and also, simultaneously, on Catalunya Música’s ‎Facebook page. It will take place at 8.15 pm, after the applause for key workers, as ‎a tribute to everyone suffering due to the coronavirus crisis.‎

The Band’s album, under the baton of its principal conductor José Rafael Pascual Vilaplana, is ‎one of the releases on the new record label that L’Auditori is launching and will be online in ‎the coming weeks. As such, it will be a digital album and will include works for wind orchestra ‎by composers Carles Suriñach (1915-1997) and Miquel Asins Arbó (1916-1996), two ‎contemporaneous musicians from Barcelona who never met one another and who both ‎forged their careers outside their native city.‎

In the words of José Rafael Pascual Vilaplana:‎

‎Barcelona saw, within a very short period of time, the birth of two composers who ‎were much admired during their lifetimes and who, even though there was never any ‎interaction between them, shared many similar characteristics in their body of artistic work, ‎with a very close aesthetic despite developing strikingly personal styles. These two music ‎creators also coincided in devoting part of their invaluable production to the world of concert ‎bands, managing to bring out the timbric potential of these wind and percussion orchestras ‎and successfully situating them in their rightful and naturally equal position within the ‎cultivation of contemporary musical art. This recording by the Barcelona Symphony Band ‎seeks to render a well-deserved tribute to two artists who, from their roots in Barcelona, ‎exported their art to different places with different styles using the concert band as their ‎vehicle for dissemination and creation.‎