May and June concerts with the OCNE

The next concerts with David Afkham at the helm of the OCNE take place on May 15, 16 and 17. The evenings will start with Conrado del Campo’s Divina Comedia, a symphonic poem imbued with an unmistakably Wagnerian orchestral language. It tells the tale of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo, recounted by Dante in Canto V of The Divine Comedy. This will be followed by Wagner’s Act 1 of Die Walküre, which features some of the most lyrical moments in the entire tetralogy of the Ring.

On June 19, 20 and 21, the program will showcase Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Straddling the line between ritual solemnity and the raw honesty of personal testimony, this piece combines the Latin liturgical text of the Mass for the Dead with poems by Wilfred Owen, written during the First World War, creating a sombre ceremony which—far from stifling it—highlights the radiance of its humanist message.

Following these concerts, on June 26, 27, 28 and 29, they will perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. Composed between 1909 and 1910, the Ninth occupies a singular place in Mahler’s career and in the broader history of symphonic music. It is a work imbued with an awareness of loss and a retrospective gaze that does not renounce formal innovation. In his final years, Mahler experienced a period of personal and creative crisis, marked by illness, the death of his daughter Maria Anna at the age of five, and his dismissal as director of the Vienna State Opera. All of this translates into music of an introspective nature, in which irony, fragmentation, and the progressive dissolution of the discourse coexist with moments of extreme lyricism. The Ninth seems to waver between vital affirmation and farewell, with a final movement that fades away in an almost suspended calm. On July 2 the orchestra will travel to perform it at Granada Festival.