The small-scale concert series Music in the Hermitages is an initiative of the Proto-fest festival in Tortosa (Catalonia), designed to bring music into heritage sites and natural settings of great symbolic value across the Terres de l’Ebre, the northern Valencian Country and the Franja de Ponent. Founded in autumn 2024, the project aims to decentralise culture and bring high-quality musical programming to rural environments, thereby creating new spaces for encounters between classical music, contemporary music and audiences.
21 de June 2026. 12 p.m Convent of Sant Salvador in Horta de Sant Joan
Amorous Spring
Orquestra de Cambra Catalana
Joan Pàmies, conductor
The Orquestra de Cambra Catalana is a musical ensemble devoted primarily to chamber orchestra repertoire, with a particular sensitivity towards the dissemination of Catalan musical heritage and contemporary creation. Founded with the aim of bringing classical music closer to audiences through an accessible and flexible approach, the orchestra combines works from the great universal repertoire with Catalan composers from different periods and aesthetic traditions.
Under the direction of Joan Pàmies, the ensemble presents Amorous Spring, a concert that moves between dance, folk memory and lyrical serenade, evoking the awakening of the senses and the emotional landscapes that herald the arrival of warmer weather. The programme offers a musical journey that connects tradition and modernity through four highly diverse perspectives on folk music and orchestral expression.
Performers
Joan Pàmies, conductor. His professional career has encompassed instrumental performance, teaching, and orchestral and choral conducting. He was a principal member of the National Orchestra of Spain and, for fifteen years, served as Professor at the Municipal Conservatory of Music of Barcelona. He is the founder and conductor of the Catalan Chamber Orchestra and has conducted choral, symphonic, and chamber ensembles both in Spain and abroad, principally throughout Europe and Latin America.
Programme
The programme opens with Rondó, Op. 100 by Teresa Borràs, a work that may be understood as an evocation of the changing seasons. While rooted in classical rondo form and traditional harmonic language, the composer introduces subtle gestures of modernity. This is followed by Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, which transport us to the rural landscapes of Transylvania. Based on traditional melodies collected during his ethnomusicological work, these six short pieces radiate vitality, spontaneity and colour.
The concert continues with Basque Melodies by Cruz López de Rego, premiered in Barcelona in 2019 on commission from the Catalan Association of Composers. Inspired by Alfons Alonso’s text Amorosa, the piece unfolds as a sequence of musical tableaux evoking different emotional atmospheres. Finally, Antonín Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings in E major, Op. 22 closes the programme with one of the most beloved works in the string repertoire. Written in just eleven days in 1875, the serenade reflects the lyrical spirit and melodic warmth characteristic of the Bohemian composer.
