Casals Festival
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- This article is about an annual classical music event held in Puerto Rico. For other uses of the name Casals, see Casals (disambiguation).
The Casals Festival is a classical music event celebrated every year in San Juan, Puerto Rico, it was founded in 1957 by the world renowned musician Pablo Casals.
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[edit] History
Pablo Casals (1876-1973), born in Spain, was a world famous virtuoso cello player. He was an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican Government and as such came to odds once the government was overthrown by Generalisimo Francisco Franco. Casals went to live in the French village of Prades. There he established the Prades Festival. Casals visited Puerto Rico in 1955 and 1956, the land where his mother Pilar Defilló was born.
In 1957, Casals moved permanently to the island where he founded the festival which bears his name. The inauguration of the festival was held in the University of Puerto Rico Theater. Casals, who was supposed to interpret Suite Number 3 in C minor, a cello solo by John Sebastian Bach, fell ill and suffered a heart attack during the reheasals. Even though Casals was hospitalized, the event went on as scheduled with the performance of pianist Rudolph Serkin.
When the festival first started, the majority of the musicians contracted by the festival orchestra for the event came from the United States. Some of the exceptions to this practice were Jesus Maria Sanroma, Henry Hutchinson Sr., Fernando Valenti and Narciso Figueroa and his brothers. By 1970, the majority of the members of the festivals orchestra were Puerto Ricans.
[edit] Participants
Amongst the musical directors who have participated in the festival besides Casals are Mstislav Rostropovich, Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Eugene Ormandy, Sir John Barbirolli, Yehudi Menuhin and recently Krzysztof Penderecki.
Amongst the musicians and performers who have participated are the following: Herbert Blomstedt, Sergiu Comissiona, James Conlon, Charles Dutoit, Sixten Ehrling, Lukas Foss, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Alberto Ginastera, Rafael Kubelík, Jesús López Cobos, Lorin Maazel, Zdenek Macal, Eduardo Mata, Zubin Mehta, Jean Pierre Rampal, Julius Rudel, Maxim Shostakovich, David Zinman, Adele Addison, Elly Ameling, June Anderson, Marian Anderson, Victoria de los Angeles, Eileen Farrell, Ana María Martínez, Edda Moser, Mariana Nicolesco, Graciela Rivera, Beverly Sills, Teresa Berganza, Grace Bumbry, Tatiana Troyanos, Frederica von Stade, Maureen Forrester, Ernst Haefliger, Richard Leech, Plácido Domingo, Richard Lewis, Leopold Simoneau, Jon Vickers, Luis Alvarez, Justino Díaz, Ara Berberian, William Warfield, Richard Stoltzman, Harold Wright, David Shifrin, Richard Stoltzman, Jean Pierre Rampal, Gerard Schwarz, Angel Romero, Andrés Segovia, Narciso Yepes, James Caldwell, Paul Wolfe, Claudio Arrau, Emanuel Ax, Daniel Barenboim, Alfred Brendel, John Browning, Bella Davidovich, Alicia De Larrocha, Ivonne Figueroa, Nelson Freire, Gary Graffman, Mieczyslaw Horzowski, Eugene Istomin, Byron Janis, Grant Johannesen, Wilhelm Kempff, Ruth Laredo, Felix Lavilla, Murray Perahia, Nikolai Petrov, Artur Rubinstein, Jesús María Sanromá, Peter Serkin, Rosalyn Tureck, André Watts, Earl Wild, Donald Miller, Norman Smith, Joshua Bell, Kyung-Wha Chung, Narciso Figueroa, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Shlomo Mintz, Igor Oistrakh, Itzhak Perlman, Vadim Repin, Ruggiero Ricci, Arnold Steinhardt, Isaac Stern, Henryk Szeryng, Joseph Szigeti, Pinchas Zuckerman, Jesse Levine, Walter Trampler, Pierre Fournier, Lynn Harrell, Leonard Rose, David Schwartz, János Starker, Paul Tortelier, José Ferrer, Alberto Ginastera and many others
Chamber Groups which have participated:
- American Brass Quintet
- Bach Aria Group
- Beaux Arts Trio
- Camerata Caribe
- Puerto Rican Musical Camara
- Conjunto de Música Barroca Zarabanda
- Budapest Quartet
- Cleveland Quartet
- Cuerda Colorado String Quartet
- Cuerdas Emerson String Quartet
- Julilliard String Quartet
- Tokio String Quartet
- Guarneri Quartet
- Mozarteum de Salzburgo Quartet
- Vermeer Quartet
- Vogler Quartet
- Deutsches Streichtrio
- Eastern Brass Quintet
- Borodin Quartet
- The Cámara group of Puerto Rico
- Musical Offering
- Principal Musicians of the Nacional Orchestra of Washington
- Figueroa Quintet
- Gabrielli Metal Quintet
- The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
- Wavely Consort
[edit] The Casals Festival today
Pablo Casals died on October 22, 1973. His widow Marta Casals who was the president of the musical committee and Co‑Chairman of the Board and Music Director until 1979, took it upon herself the responsibility of continuing the annual celebration of the event. The festival has now taken on a new dimension with the appointment of pianist and scholar Elias Lopez Soba and bass/baritone Justino Diaz as artistic and musical directors. These two renowned Puerto Rican artists have continued to follow the legacy of Pablo and Marta Casals, attracting many world-famous musicians for a series of concerts. The festival which is now held at the Luis A. Ferre Center for the Performing Arts in San Juan, will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2006 with a performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra under the musical direction of Maestro Christoph Eschenbach.
The Prades Festival established by Casals in France in 1952 was renamed the Pablo Casals Festival.
