Now in its 57th year, the Pablo Casals festival is one of the most respected chamber music festivals in France and, indeed, in Europe. The event organisers consistently attract soloists and larger groups of the highest quality to perform in the beautiful abbey of Saint-Michel de Cuxà and other churches in the Prades area. The programme is mainly based around much known artistes such as Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

As you might expect from a festival named after a world famous cellist, many of the concerts focus on the cello, although there are also evenings devoted to organ music, Mozart’s clarinet concertos, orchestral works for children and Czech music

PROGRAMME 2008 - 43 concerts - details to follow

(Reservations by internet from 10/01/2006 - http://www.prades-festival-casals.com/cas-1000.php

Thursday 24th July
Place de Catalogne - 22h
Open air screening of film: ’P. Casals un musicien dans le monde’
Free admission

Saturday 26th July
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Orchestre National de Chambre d’Andorre

Monday 28th July
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Piano recital (Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Stravinski

Wednesday 30th July
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h Morgenstern Trio (1st prize Concours de Vienne 2007)

Friday 1st August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h Grands Quatuors (Quartett de Vienne Artis and Quatuor Talich (Prague)
Chostakovitch, Mozart, Haydn, Dvorak

Saturday 2nd August
Le Lido - 11h
L’Abbé Oliba en son temps - lecture
Free admission

Saturday 2nd August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h Millénaire de l’Abbé Oliba... 4 centuries of musical architecture musicale and faith in homage to the founder of the Abbaye St-Michel de Cuxà...

Sunday 3rd August
Eglise de Catllar - 17.30h
Concert, Révélations de l’ADAMI

Sunday 3rd August
Eglise St Pierre de Prades - 21h
Bach ... 58 years ago, Casals and Bach got together and sent out a superb message.

Monday 4th August
Le Lido - 11h
Hommage to Olivier Messiaen
Free admission

Monday 4th August
Eglise de Molitg - 17.30h
Casals in Molitg... from 1956 to 1966, the inhabitants gathered around to listen to Casals practicing.

Monday 4th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Italian evening - chamber music

Tuesday 5th August
Prieuré de Marcevol - 17.30h
A tous vents...tramontane or not - the greatest wind instrument players gather.

Tuesday 5th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Visions...dream or reality..... or the opposite
Beethoven, Golijov, Haydn

Wednesday 6th August
Salle La catalane-Ille sur têt - 17.30h
Concert for children and parents Ernest H Papier, Poulenc, Saint Saens
Free admission

Wednesday 6th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Mozart, ... 4 adapted works

Thursday 7th August
Casino de Vernet-Les-Bains - 17.30h
Conférence rencontre with Krzysztof Penderecki (composer)
free admission

Thursday 7th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Romantic cello ...Brahms and Schumann

Thursday 9th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Passions - Dame Félicity Lott sings Wolf and Schumann

Friday 8th August
Eglise de Corneilla de Conflent - 17.30h
Cordes et marteaux, ... frappées ou frottées, elles en font entendre de toutes les couleurs
Bartok, Kreisler, Beethoven, Ravel

Friday 8th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Beethoven, ... sonata written for one of the greatest cellists of the era

Saturday 9th August
Le Lido - 11h
Composers faced with the Spanish Civil War
Free admission

Saturday 9th August
Mémorial de Rivesaltes - 19h
At Hemingway’s side ...
Free admission

Saturday 9th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Hommage to Pablo Casals

Sunday 10th August
Le Lido - 11h
Meet composer Krzysztof Penderecki
Free admission

Sunday 10th August
Etablissement thermal de Thuès - 16h
student Concert
Free admission

Sunday 10th August
Eglise de Villefranche de conflent - 17.30h
Happy birthday Maestro! 75th birthday of Krzysztof Penderecki

Sunday 10th August
Eglise St Pierre de Prades - 21h
Coral de la Universitat de les Illes Balears

Monday 11th August
Eglise de Ria - 11h
student Concert
free admission

Monday 11th August
Eglise de Finestret - 16h
student Concert
free admission

Monday 11th August
Eglise de Campoussy - 16h
student Concert
free admission

Monday 11th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
From the Moldau au Danube, ... Vienna, Budapest, Prague

Tuesday 12th August
Eglise de Codalet - 11h
student Concert
free admission

Tuesday 12th August
Eglise de Campoussy - 16h
student Concert
free admission

Tuesday 12th August
Eglise d’Olette - 16h
student Concert
free admission

Tuesday 12th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Ecoles de Paris, ...Société nationale?, ou société indépendante?...deux écoles...une musique française

Wednesday 13th August
Eglise de Rigarda - 11h
student Concert
free admission

Wednesday 13th August
Eglise St Pierre de Prades - 16h
student Concert
free admission

Wednesday 13th August
Eglise de Mosset - 16h
student Concert
free admission

Wednesday 13th August
Abbaye St Michel de Cuxà - 21h
Closing concert - Schubert

*Pablo casals

Pau Carlos Salvador Casals i Defilló (December 29, 1876 - October 22, 1973), commonly known as Pablo Casals, was a virtuoso Catalan cello player (and later conductor). He made many recordings throughout his career, of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, also as conductor, but Casals is best remembered for the recording of Bach’s Cello Suites he made from 1936 to 1939.

Early years
Casals was born in El Vendrell, Catalonia (Spain). His father, Carles Casals i Ribes (1852-1908), was a parish organist and choirmaster. He gave Casals instruction in piano, violin, and organ. At the age of 4 Casals could play the violin, piano and flute. When Casals was 11, he first heard the cello performed by a group of traveling musicians, and decided to dedicate himself to the instrument. In 1888 his mother, Pilar Defilló de Casals, who was born in Puerto Rico of Catalan ancestry, took him to Barcelona, where he enrolled in the Escuela Municipal de Música. There he studied cello, theory, and piano. He made prodigious progress as a cellist; on February 23, 1891 he gave a solo recital in Barcelona at the age of 14. He graduated from the Escuela with honors two years later.

In 1893, the Spanish composer Albéniz heard him playing in a trio in a café and gave him a letter of introduction to the private secretary to María Cristina, the Queen Regent, in Madrid. Casals was asked to play at informal concerts in the palace, and was granted a royal stipend to study composition at the Conservatory de Musica y Declamacion in Madrid with the master Víctor Mirecki. He also played in the newly organized Quartet Society. In 1895 he went to Paris, where, having lost his stipend from Spain, he earned a living by playing second cello in the theater orchestra of the Folies Marigny. In 1896, he returned to Spain and received an appointment to the faculty of the Escuela Municipal de Música in Barcelona. He was also appointed principal cellist in the orchestra of Barcelona’s opera house, the Liceu. In 1897 he appeared as soloist with the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, and was awarded the Order of Carlos III from the Queen.

International career
In 1899, Casals played at The Crystal Palace in London, and later for Queen Victoria at her summer residence at Cowes, Isle of Wight. On November 12, 1899, he appeared as a soloist at a prestigious Lamoureux Concert in Paris, and played at Lamoureux again on December 17, 1899, with great public and critical acclaim. He toured Spain and the Netherlands with the pianist Harold Bauer (1900-1901) In 1901-1902 he made his first tour of the United States. In 1903 toured South America. On January 15, 1904, he was invited to play at the White House for president Theodore Roosevelt. On March 9 of that year he made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, playing Richard Strauss’s "Don Quixote" under the baton of the composer. In 1906 he became associated with the talented young Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia, who studied with him and began to appear in concerts as Mme. P. Casals-Suggia, although they were not legally married. Their liaison was dissolved in 1912; in 1914 Casals married the American socialite and singer Susan Metcalfe; they were separated in 1928, but did not divorce until 1957.

Back in Paris, Casals organized a trio with the pianist Alfred Cortot and the violinist Jacques Thibaud; they played concerts and made recordings until 1937. Casals also became interested in conducting, and in 1919 he organized, in Barcelona, the Orquesta Pau Casals and led its first concert on October 13, 1920. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Orquesta Pau Casals ceased its activities. Casals was an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican government, and after its defeat vowed never to return to Spain until democracy was restored. He settled in the French village of Prades, on the Spanish frontier; between 1939 and 1942 he made sporadic appearances as a cellist in the unoccupied zone of southern France and in Switzerland. So fierce was his opposition to the Francisco Franco regime in Spain that he declined to appear in countries that recognized the totalitarian Spanish government, making an exception when he took part in a concert of chamber music in the White House on November 13, 1961, at the invitation of President John F Kennedy, whom he admired.

In 1950 he resumed his career as conductor and cellist at the Prades Festival, organized in commemoration of the bicentennial of the death of Bach; he continued leading the Prades Festivals until 1966. In 1956, he made his permanent residence San Juan, Puerto Rico, where his mother had been born (when the island was still under Spanish rule). In 1957 an annual Casals Festival was inaugurated there.

On August 3, 1957, at the age of 80, Casals married Marta Montañez Martinez, a young pupil of his.

Presidential Medal of FreedomThroughout the 1960s Casals gave many master classes in Switzerland, Italy, Berkeley, California, and Marlboro, Vermont, some of which were televised.

Casals was also a composer; perhaps his most effective work is La sardana, for an ensemble of cellos, which he composed in 1926. His oratorio El pesebre (The Manger) was performed for the first time in Acapulco, Mexico, on December 17, 1960. One of his last compositions was the Himno a las Naciones Unidas (Hymn of the United Nations); he conducted its first performance in a special concert at the United Nations on October 24, 1971, 2 months before his 95th birthday.

Casals wrote a memoir, Joys and Sorrows; Reflections (1973).

Casals died in 1973 in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the age of 96. In 1979 his mortal remains were finally laid to rest in his beloved home town of El Vendrell, Catalonia. He did not live to see the end of the Franco regime, but he was posthumously honored by the Spanish government under King Juan Carlos I, which issued in 1976 a commemorative postage stamp in honor of his 100th birthday.

Quotations
British music critic W.J. Turner heard Casals play in Vienna in November, 1913. He wrote shortly thereafter in a letter:

his playing... "is one of those rare things that may only come once in a lifetime and even not in one person’s life, it may be centuries before there is anyone like that again. He is a funny little fellow only about 30 and plays with his eyes shut practically the whole time, every note every pause and tone colour is reflected in his face and to hear him again, to draw the bow across is a revelation." < br> From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FESTIVAL PABLO CASALS - BP 24 - 33, rue de l’Hospice - 66502 Prades Cedex Tél: +33 (0)4.68.96.33.07 - Fax: +33 (0)4.68.96.50.95
email: contact@prades-festival-casals.com