This weekend, the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra returns to L’Auditori de Barcelona’s Hall 1, Pau Casals with a programme featuring Narek Hakhnazaryan, one of today’s most exciting cellists.

Hakhnazaryan will make his debut with the OBC performing one of the mainstays of the cello repertoire, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme. The work is based on a theme by the Russian composer inspired by the aesthetics of the classical period and featuring great variation, with highly evocative and lyrical moments as well as moments of great technical skill and musical effect.

In addition, Narek Hakhnazaryan will play Nocturne, Op 19, No. 4, also by Tchaikovsky, an evocative and sensitive work for cello and orchestra that will allow you to enjoy this soloist’s most intimate facet. Armenia is constantly bringing great musicians into the music world, be they pianists, conductors, singers, violinists or, as in this case, cellists.

Nuno Coelho will lead the OBC for the second time this season and conduct the programme. Coelho, who won the Cadaqués Orchestra International Conducting Competition, is a conductor with an upward trajectory endorsed by some of the great international orchestras he has conducted, ranging from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the Gulbenkian Orchestra, of which he is the guest conductor. Furthermore, he splits his conducting work between opera and symphonic music.

As for the programme, it will be a journey through Romantic music focusing on the cello as the main instrument. In addition to the works by Tchaikovsky already mentioned above, the event will also feature the overture of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Marksman), which is considered the first German romantic opera, and Richard Strauss’s extraordinary suite Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman), a sublime piece of music inspired by Molière’s works and the Commedia dell’arte.