They've done it again!

Amidst the discussions in the street and in the press about the assembly of Lohengrin at the LyceumOn days of concert season launches for the next academic year, and on a rainy day with the winds rising at the gates of spring, attending the peace of a Quartet Casals concert is a soothing relief from so much outside noise. And yes, the members of the chamber ensemble have done it again: that is, achieving the complicity and communion of the acolyte audience with an exquisite, well-crafted program, and above all with the incentive of attending Cristina Cordero's first viola performance, after Jonathan Brown had left the quartet. All this, in the modernist hall of the Palau de la Música.

The new addition maintains the high, very high standards of this ensemble, which is undoubtedly one of our luxuries and best musical ambassadors. Serenity and balance were conveyed by the four members of the quartet: the aforementioned Cordero, the brothers Abel (violin II) and Arnau Tomàs (cello), and the violinist Vera Martínez Mehner.

The program opened with the third quartet (in E flat major) by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, whose bicentenary of death we will celebrate next year. Neat lines, balance, and transparency dominated the Quartet Casals' performance.

Commissioned by the group and by the Palau de la Música itself, Burning Earth This is the work by Elisenda Fábregas that was an absolute premiere. A compact piece, solidly written, in a single movement but with changing dynamics throughout the work, which acts as a metaphor for the transformations of the Earth, with oscillations between the lights and shadows that loom over the planet. A militant work, without a doubt, although far from programmatic speculations.

The second part brought us the best of Johannes Brahms's romanticism, with the interpretation of the Quartet in C minor No. 1A piece with vaguely Beethovenian reminiscences, but in which Brahms appears with the distinctive voice that characterized him as a true German Romantic. Once again, the Casals Quartet delivered with stylistic propriety, interpretive rigor, undeniable technique, sensitivity, and communicative ability.