The party ended without much fanfare.

I doubt the 2024-2025 season of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia (OBC) will be remembered for anything particularly brilliant. Over the past nine months, there has been a lack of ideas, imagination, and creativity in the programming, and above all, leadership in the conducting.

Ludovic Morlot isn't a bad conductor, but he hasn't won over his musicians or had a special connection with our audiences. The result of the season's final concert: uneventful, like those parties you're invited to, attend out of obligation, get bored, and find any opportunity or excuse to go home, put on a good black-and-white film, have a cup of tea, brush your teeth, and go to bed, because tomorrow will be the day.

This was the feeling I had as I left L'Auditori on Saturday night. And that was despite the fact that a delightful Ravel work was being programmed. Spanish Hebrew, that, together with The child of the sorceries, is one of the Basque-French musician's great stage works. A cast that's a bit of a walk-through (who can find grace in the baritone Alexandre Duhamel, whom we've seen before at the Liceu?), direction lacking theatrical flair, and a plodding orchestral background. No disasters and little joy. Voila!.

We were a little luckier with Daniel Lozakovich, an amazing violinist who with his Stradivarius revealed himself to be a great musician in the face of two major challenges such as Poem by Ernest Chausson and, above all, Tzigane Ravel's. Well-defined accents, dreamy phrasing, and a balance between feeling and reason—crucial to the interpretation of French music—presided over their performance. Before that, the OBC had warmed up with Kenneth Hesketh's orchestral version of another Ravel, in this case Headphone sites, originally for two pianos.

Three hours after the concert started, we ended the day at home, watching for the umpteenth time All about Eve by the great Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It's what happens when you've been to a season-ending party, if not disappointing, then certainly uninspiring. And then you get on with it.