How Barcelona Obertura is transforming the city's classical music reputation

Barcelona is such a vibrant and attractive city that it almost needs no promotion. It is already awash with visitors savouring its architecture, cuisine, museums, and seashore. The grid structure makes it easy to navigate, until you get pleasantly lost in the old town with its labyrinth of meandering alleyways, stuffed with little shops and hidden tapas joints. The temperature is usually less challenging than climates further inland. Most of all, its wide boulevards, with their long strings of pavement cafés, make it an excellent city for ambling (but keep your hand on your phone or wallet as you do; it can be pickpocket heaven too). Then, of course, there is the lure of football and the big stadium events - Bruce Springsteen was in town while I was there, trailing Barrack Obama and Steven Spielberg in his wake - that have been a feature ever since Freddie Mercury teamed up with Montserrat Cabballé for the 1992 Olympics.

In a way it is the Caballé legacy that the city's classical music institutions are thinking about now; how to bring international visitors in to savour their offerings as more than an incidental adjunct to the trip, particularly outside of prime tourist season. Barcelona has two very different concert halls, L'Auditori and Palau de la Musica, as well as one superb opera house in the best mid-nineteenth century style, Gran Teatre del Liceu. They have always sported the sort of individual programme one would expect of any great city like the Catalan capital. Now though, they have pooled their resources to present themselves to the world as a unified force: Barcelona Obertura (obertura is Spanish for overture).

This enables them to draw their disparate programmes together throughout the year to form a series of mini-festivals - some themed, some seasonal. During the past six months there were Christmas, Easter and Spring festivals. In February there was rather a poignant sequence called Women Who Die for Love which, sensibly, did not quite coincide with Valentine's Day (anyway, Catalonia celebrates its romantic liaisons on St. Jordi's Day, 23 April, when the weather is better). I attended the second of the Spring mini-festivals at the end of April.

In the L'Auditori's chamber hall there was an intense and deeply rewarding performance of the string trio version (by Sitkovetsky) of Bach's Goldberg Variations by Abel and Arnau Tomas (violin and cello) and violist Jonathan Brown. L'Auditori is a stern modernist building on the northern edge of the city centre in a rather unfashionable part of town. It also houses a symphony hall, a musical instruments museum with a fascinating collection of early guitars, and a musical school. From the outside it is a bit grim and there are no obvious adornments inside either, but as a place to concentrate on the music in comfortable seats without distraction - perfect for Bach - it works very well. This is the unflamboyant, business-like, side of Catalonia, when Barcelona shows itself in parallel to Milan.

It could not be more different from the Palau de La Musica, right at the historic centre. This extraordinary Art Nouveau confection, designed as the perfect antidote to the hierarchy of 19th century theatres and the gloom of expressionism, is a riot of plaster figures and decorative extravagance that challenges the music to match its enthusiasm. On one side is the unmistakeable figure of Beethoven, glaring down on the players but representing 'the first free artist,' says Joan Oller i Cuartero, the director of La Palau. On the other side is the moustachioed figure of Josep Clavé, a composer and politician from the city who created a network of choirs drawn from the factory workers. That network still exists and owns the building. 'He demonstrates,' says Oller, 'that Palau always belongs to the people.'

©Paco Amate

Liceu Opera Barcelona (pictured above) sits on La Rambla, that famous boulevard that leads down to the sea and hosts a myriad stalls and cafés on its tree-lined central reservation. The theatre is from the same period as London's Royal Opera House and, like it, a new set of foyers have been added to the side, making it feel traditional and modern at the same time. I saw a witty and raw production by Olivier Py of Massenet's Manon there as part of the April programme - styled with much lingerie and grubby underpants - with the orchestra playing beautifully for Marc Minkowski. Rather like the city it serves, the house manages to be contemporary and traditional at the same time.

Palau de la Musica director Joan Oller (Joan is the Catalan version of John), explains how the innovative collaboration between the three venues is intended to work. 'The idea is to promote Barcelona as being more relevant in the classical music world. Now we do not feel we are in the top 10. We want to provoke people to come here for the music first.' Despite Barcelona Obertura's focus on the venues, he emphasises that it is open to and already includes many of the city's musical groups and spaces. The March City of Music Festival included concerts in several libraries, for example, as well as in Gaudi's Casa Battlo, the National Art Museum and the Mies van der Rohe and Miro Foundations.

'This is a long-term project,' Oller says. 'Nothing has changed yet and we will need to spend time and money over several years to make it happen. Barcelona as a city has to decide what sort of tourism it wants, and the answer is not the sort that is only interested in cheap beer. We don't have to change our programming much, just present it better in an international context, especially to visitors from smaller places who are not already always going to Berlin, Paris, London or New York. Perhaps most importantly, artists enjoy performing here and when they do, so will the audiences.’