Originality, transgression and romanticism with Beethoven’s Ninth

Under the theme Renaixements (Renaissances), L’Auditori de Barcelona opens its 2025–2026 season on October 3 and 4 with a powerful inaugural concert. The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia (OBC), together with a distinguished group of soloists—including Canadian-Lebanese soprano Joyce El-Khoury (pictured)—will perform Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

The season’s theme invites audiences to reflect on new beginnings, ruptures and transformations in the history of music. It’s fitting, then, that the first concert features Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D minor, Op. 125—a monumental choral symphony composed between 1822 and 1824, long celebrated as one of the great masterpieces of Western classical music.

Adapted as the anthem of Europe, the work sets Friedrich Schiller’s poem An die Freude (Ode to Joy), with additional text by Beethoven. Described as “profoundly original, even transgressive,” the symphony carries a romantic spirit that speaks to humanity across time. Its final movement, performed here with the Orfeó Català, reaches towards an exalted ideal of human unity beyond individual differences.

Under the baton of principal conductor Ludovic Morlot, the OBC will be joined by a quartet of soloists: Joyce El-Khoury (soprano), Silvia Tro Santafé (mezzo-soprano), René Barbera (tenor) and Davóne Tines (bass).

El-Khoury will also appear in another highlight of the evening: La mort de Cléopâtre, a lyrical scene by Hector Berlioz. The program opens with the three-part overture (symphony) from Sesostri, re d’Egitto by Domènec Terradellas—a Catalan composer whose opera, premiered in Rome in 1751, was a resounding success and later became the first opera by a Catalan composer to be staged in Catalonia.

If you want to mark the opening of the OBC season at L’Auditori, don’t miss this performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Full details are available on the website.