Festival – Festival de Pollença

Presentation

After celebrating the 60th edition, it is time to gather momentum to celebrate another 60 years. This momentum must be unwavering, well-founded and always based on the essence of the Festival.

The programme of this 61st edition pays tribute to these two instruments: Mozart’s 22nd piano concerto in the opening concert and Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in the closing concert. The piano is a sublime main instrument of Schubert’s romanticism and the main protagonist of the piano recital program. We state the devotion that composers have had to the violin as a solo instrument throughout the history of music – from the baroque of Vivaldi, through the purest classicism of Mozart, to the high point of Mendelssohn’s romanticism. Naturally, we have not forgotten either the voice, which will explain Les recettes de l’amour of French composers, or the baroque, which has always been present in the Festival’s editions.

Both instruments have certainly been influential in the history of the Festival. Firstly, the violin was the instrument of both the founder (Newman) and the Festival’s promoter (Prokop) and has undoubtedly played the leading role in the most impressive evenings in the Sant Domingo Cloister. Meanwhile, the piano soon became the “resident” instrument. It was the instrument that the Festival owned, which had an appealing effect and facilitated the organisation of chamber concerts, as an accompanying instrument or as a soloist instrument in the piano recitals, which always featured the best pianists of the time.

The Festival team’s strategic decision to start with a piano of the highest quality, a Grand D Steinway and Sons, was a very wise one, which positioned the Festival as one of the main events to achieve international recognition in the 1960s.

The programme of this 61st edition pays tribute to these two instruments: Schumann’s piano concerto in the opening concert and Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in the closing concert. The piano is a sublime reference instrument for Schubert’s romanticism and the piano recital programme’s main feature. We state the devotion that composers have had to the violin as a solo instrument throughout the history of music – from the baroque of Vivaldi, through the purest classicism of Mozart, to the high point of Mendelssohn’s romanticism. Naturally, we have not forgotten either the voice, which will explain Les recettes de l’amour of French composers, or the baroque, which has always been present in the Festival’s editions.

The entire Festival team has worked hard to ensure that, this year, you can enjoy the best works performed by the best artists on the world scene.

Pere Bonet i Bonet
Programming and management consultant

The Festival team

The Festival is managed by the local technical service team, as appointed by the town’s mayor. From year 2020, the Festival is proud to announce its collaboration with Pere Bonet i Bonet, as our leading advisor. His labour, as an expert technician, is assisting with the general management and programming of the Festival and in artistic, organisational and logistical aspects.

The cloister

The Dominicans built this stunning convent between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the cloister of which each year hosts one of the world’s largest classical music festivals.

This convent was built by Dominican Friars (1) between 1558 and 1616 in order to bolster their presence in Pollença, having initially settled in the Old Oratory of the Rosary. The Dominicans occupied the church and the convent until 1833, when the site was taken by the government at the time (2), and a few years later the Spanish government ceded it to the Pollença Town Council. Since then it has had many uses, including as a hospice, Civil Guard barracks, a school, a library and a museum.

The church of the convent has a basilica floor plan (3) and ten side chapels, each adorned with an altarpiece from the period of its construction. The most striking example is the one at the head of the church, which was made between 1651 and 1662 by Majorcan sculptor Joan Antoni Oms and is dedicated to the Virgin of the Rosary, patron saint of the Dominicans. The painting dates back to the fifteenth century and comes from the Old Oratory of the Rosary.

Next to the church is the pièce de résistance of this building: a Baroque-style (4) cloister which was completed in 1616. Well known for the beauty of its four arched corridors, it has also been the venue for the Pollença Classical Music Festival since 1962. The best orchestras, choirs and opera singers of the world participate in this annual event, which takes place during the summer, enjoying not only the beautiful scenery but also the excellent acoustics provided by this cloister.

(1) Dominican Friars: The Order of Preachers, also known as the Dominican Order, is a Catholic religious order founded by Spanish priest Domingo de Guzmán in 1216. Its members, the Dominican Friars, advocate a life of preaching peace to the people, having taken vows of poverty, austerity, chastity and obedience. Famed Dominicans from throughout history include Sir Thomas Aquinas, Vicente Ferrer and Bartolomé de las Casas.

(2) State Expropriation: Throughout the nineteenth century, Spanish liberal governments carried out a process of expropriating, nationalising and privatising many of the properties that the Catholic Church had amassed across the country. The aim of this was to boost public coffers, which were suffering heavily due to wars and the loss of colonies.

(3) Basilica floor plan: A type of architectural floor plan that dates back to Roman public buildings. It consists of a main nave separated from other lower naves by rows of columns, allowing churchgoers to focus on the chevet of the church, which is usually an apse where the high altar is found.

(4) Baroque-style: A term identified with a cultural movement and artistic style dating approximately from the seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century, characterised by excessive ornamentation. In fact, the concept was coined by its critics using the French word ‘baroque’, one translation of which is ‘extravagant’, referring to what they considered was an excess on the part of certain artists.

Organitza i patrocina