The Association of Theatre Companies of Catalonia (Adetca) offers data on Barcelona's theatres every September. And this year, for the first time, it also provides data for the whole country thanks to an initiative by the Department of Culture. Added to the figures collected by Adetca in Barcelona are now those of the municipal and private venues in the rest of the country. The result: in the 2025-2026 season, Catalan theatres have gathered 4,081,780 spectators and have collected 115,569,804 euros, with an occupancy of 67%, in 16,988 performances of 2,829 shows.

The good run of Catalan artists at Olympic venues continues. This year, after Rosalía filled the Palau Sant Jordi four times and El Último de la Fila played the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium twice, now it is Aitana's turn, with everything sold out for four concerts at the Palau Sant Jordi: the first one this Friday and the other three on September 5, 7, and 8. And in October, Oques Grasses will say goodbye with the feat of four performances at the stadium.

"I will have to make sure I haven't killed myself", writes musician Josele Santiago (Madrid, 1965) in the book Desde el jergón (Contra, 2026). The singer and guitarist of the group Los Enemigos signs a musical autobiography extraordinary for what it tells, for how it is written, for the tone, for the point of view and for the way music, life and dreams walk together in the text. Each chapter is born from a song by Los Enemigos, first-rate material as befits one of the best Spanish-language rock bands. And each chapter grows sentence by sentence, combining personal and social biography. There is rage and disappointment, also wonder and amazement, various pains and passion. And love is not lacking, like the one that exploded when he met the Barcelona-based screenwriter Núria Torreblanca. "And I ended up settling in Catalonia", he says, "madly in love".

One of the great names in Catalan cinema and theater, Francesc Garrido, died this Sunday night at the age of 56, as confirmed by the actor's circle to ARA. Garrido was known for his roles in films such as Smoking room, Mar adentro and Balandrau, vent salvatge, and series such as La sala, Vida privada and Jaguar. He also had a solid theater career, with notable performances in productions such as Àlex Rigola's a propòsit d'The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov; The Video Nobody Sees, by Martin Crimp, under the direction of Carme Portaceli; The Alchemist, the adaptation that Michael De Cock made of Opus nigrum by Marguerite Yourcenar, as well as participating in different works by Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen.

Josep Montero, the leader of the group Oques Grasses, will be in charge of choosing the songs for the Mercè Pyromusical, which this year will not be held in Montjuïc as in previous editions, but at Nova Icària beach. According to the Barcelona City Council, for the show that will take place on September 27th as the closing of the city's main festival, Montero has prepared "an eclectic playlist with a proposal open to various styles and sensibilities, and with a prominent presence of Catalan music". As usual, the songs will be revealed as they are played on the night of the Pyromusical.

Laia Giralt dances in front of thousands of people every time there is a concert by The Weeknd. For example, she will do so on September 1st at the Estadi Lluís Companys in Barcelona, because since 2022 she has been part of the Canadian artist's tour's dance team. Born in Vilanova i la Geltrú, trained in London, and residing in Los Angeles, Giralt takes advantage of a free moment to speak with ARA by phone.

Singer-songwriter Dolly Parton died this Tuesday at the age of 80. This was announced by her family in a video shared on social media. A country music legend and one of the most iconic artists of her generation, Parton leaves behind a legacy that includes songs like Jolene and I will always love you. A few days ago, the singer herself explained to People magazine that she had to cancel some concerts due to health problems she had neglected while caring for her husband, Carl Thomas Dean, who died in March 2025 at the age of 82. Unfortunately, she didn't make it.

"It is the first time that the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra has undertaken a tour like this, and it will not be easy for it to be repeated," said Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner and director of the Wagnerian festival held every summer in Bavaria, a few weeks ago. The tour in question begins on August 29 at the Palau de la Música, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Peralada Festival, and will then go through Santander, Seville, Valencia, and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The baton will be held by Pablo Heras-Casado (Granada, 1977), who made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in 2023 conducting Parsifal, and where in 2028 he will conduct the complete tetralogy of The Ring of the Nibelung. He is "one of the most recognized international batons currently," as Joan Oller, general director of the Palau de la Música, recalls. Heras-Casado, who retains Catalan from his years of training and work in Catalonia – which he speaks and writes fluently – speaks to ARA by phone during a break from the intense summer activity in Bayreuth.

There is an understandable fascination in the choice of musician Jaume Pla (la Bisbal d'Empordà, 1977), known as Mazoni, for art. "It's a work that I like because it combines the dreamlike part with the part of intrigue drama in a single story and with an ending that left me thinking for a good while," recalls Pla. That's why he recommends The Tempest, one of the latest works by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), which in Catalan can be read in translations by Josep Maria de Sagarra, Salvador Oliva, and Miquel Desclot, among others. "I also really like storms, the preceding weather, the moment when it falls...", adds Pla.

Dolly Parton has wanted to reassure her fans, and the music world in general. In an interview with People magazine, the American singer-songwriter recalls that in May she had to cancel some concerts in Las Vegas, and a few days ago her attendance at an event in Dollywood, her amusement park in Tennessee. "The doctor told me I couldn't even travel," says Parton, 80, who assures that for now she continues to recover from some health problems and at the same time is working on "other ways to get her music" to the public, such as "performances with avatars". In fact, she is already in talks with specialized companies.

"This chaos, this disaster, they have created it expressly to try to play with our emotions, to try to make us give up, to leave, and to continue selling the island piece by piece and make a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans," said Bad Bunny on Saturday during the concert at the Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan. This forceful criticism was aimed at the Esencia project, which foresees the construction of a luxury tourist megacomplex in the southwest of the island that includes an exclusive residential area and several hotels in Cabo Rojo. In addition, Bad Bunny invited the concert audience to participate in the demonstrations against the project and also called for the resignation of Jennifer González, the governor of Puerto Rico since January 2025.

Beyoncé and Jay Z together reached a peak of popularity that was difficult to surpass with Crazy in love, a 2003 song that on Spotify alone has accumulated almost 2 billion streams, more or less the same as Hey Ya!, by the duo OutKast, also from 2003. Another duo, Gnarls Barkley, spread the magic of Crazy around the world in 2006, and today it has a not insignificant 1.568 billion streams. Gnarls Barkley was an adventure of the New York producer Danger Mouse and the Atlanta singer CeeLo Green, each with their own career. The former had already produced Gorillaz albums and had shown boundless imagination in his own projects. CeeLo Green could boast a quite successful career, first with the hip-hop group Goodie Mob and then as a solo artist. But Crazy was a whole other story.

Franco's censorship was implacable with Manuel de Pedrolo (1918-1990). The essay "Cartes de Catalunya", written in 1966 and described by censors as a text of "definitively separatist character" and "political propaganda with particular violence", was rejected by him up to three times. Comanegra recovered Cartes de Catalunya in 2025 and included it in the anthology Prosa de combat, which brings together some forty articles by Pedrolo published between 1964 and 1988, some of which are also unpublished. This anthology is the book recommended by Òscar Andreu, co-director of the program La competència on RAC1, presenter of Està passant on TV3, and author of Manual de defensa del català (Univers, 2026), the best-selling non-fiction book in Catalan on the last Sant Jordi.

Jorge Drexler (Montevideo, 1964) is a wellspring of musical curiosity. His attitude and his eagerness to experiment within songs and emotions have made him a fundamental influence on countless musicians. Drexler's new adventure is the album Taracá (Sony, 2026), a lesson in sensitivity and rhythmic exuberance, with Uruguayan candombe as its driving force, which vindicates the restorative power of words and the subversive power of dance. It includes collaborations from Puerto Rican Young Miko, Andalusian Ángeles Toledano, and Meritxell Neddermann from Maresme, as well as Uruguayan groups like the murga Falta y Respeto, among others. The corresponding tour will stop at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona on October 31st.

You stand at the gates of seventh heaven, ceremonial and sensible, but then you run to hide among worldly joy, wild and reckless. You rise like a solemn prophet unafraid to make friends with the creatures of hell. You wear humor as a shield, and espadrilles to keep your feet light and grounded. Hope is more rhetorical than convincing, and yet, you do not give up proclaiming it. You sing of love and all that happens "skirting the perimeter." The years pass and you are still here, giant of Solsonès, provoking a smile with a joke, as if the intention were to lessen the impact you cause with your performance. You know it well, Roger Mas, who summons 2,000 people to marvel at the complete works of two albums with the Cobla Sant Jordi Ciutat de Barcelona. And at the Teatre Grec, the same venue where on July 2, 2022 you celebrated 25 years of artistic career with one of the best shows in the history of the Grec Festival. It made sense, therefore, that the same festival would now host the concert of the complete cobla works.

The two ground floors at number 54 Via Laietana in Barcelona were a bank office and a clothing store, but the most peculiar use of one was as an occupied afterparty. During the pandemic lockdown, the occupants often brought chairs outside to spend time in the sun. Later, the premises were left closed, waiting for someone to love them. The location is privileged, on the corner with Ramon Mas street and in front of the Urquinaona metro entrance (L4), a traffic-free zone after the urban planning reform of Via Laietana and Jonqueres street. And now these 354 m² have been rented by the Palau de la Música, which will open the Nova Porta del Palau there in the autumn, as Joaquim Uriach explained to ARA, president of the Orfeó Català-Palau de la Música Catalana Foundation. For now, the space is in the final phase of construction, and the forecast is that the inauguration will be in September or October.

The artistic choice foreshadowed a very interesting night to musically celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Grec Festival at the Grec Theatre in Barcelona. And the repertoire that appeared in the program showed special care in the selection of material, with a subtle thread of Greek references, bridges between the different shores of the Mediterranean and Latin America, pacifist determination, and poetic scope (from Zülfü Livaneli to Kavafis, from Aristophanes to Ramon Llull). More than a festive revelry and intoxication, Songs of the Grec. 50 years of music, bridges, and mestizaje was intuited as a serene night, and it was, but with a bunch of unforgettable moments.

In January 2026 it was made official the creation of the Robert Gerhard Foundation, dedicated to the dissemination of the work of one of the most relevant Catalan composers of the 20th century, born in Valls in 1896 and died in Cambridge in 1970. According to the president of the Foundation, Edmon Colomer, one of the purposes was that "the musical self-esteem of the country should be translated into cultural facts". The first translation arrived this Friday with the presentation of the first Robert Gerhard Biennial, promoted by the same foundation and L'Auditori, with the collaboration of Esmuc, the Museum of Music and the Friends of Music and Valls. The program will unfold in different spaces in Barcelona and Valls from September 30 to November 22.

The Costa Brava, England and Colombia are the cardinal points that guide the musical trajectory of Cristina Pérez Tallada (Lloret de Mar, 1998), Cristina La Mar as her artistic name. "Lloret is my home, I love it very much. And I dreamed of Colombia; very accurately, I dreamed I was going there", explains the singer from Selva, who on Saturday, July 18th, performs at Poble Espanyol (7:30 PM), as part of the programming of the village of the Barts Festival. It is not surprising, then, that the songs on the album Una flor en la luna (Warner Chapell, 2026) are steeped in Mediterranean details and, above all, Colombian perfume, both rhythmically and in the sound of the strings. "Traveling through Colombia, I fell in love with Andean music. I enjoyed listening to it. Little by little, I met incredible people and began to listen to songs by great Latin American artists like Simón Díaz – from the Llanos –, Atahualpa Yupanqui, Mercedes Sosa...", she recalls.

"Look at this lectern, it's historic. It's very beautiful", says Josep Pons (Puig-reig, 1957). He is in the pit of the Liceu, the chosen space for a press conference "special and sensitive", as Víctor Garcia de Gomar, artistic director of the Rambla theatre, says. Pons is bidding farewell to the musical direction of the Gran Teatre del Liceu after fourteen years of work. The farewell is twofold. On the one hand, from the pit, with Falstaff, Verdi's opera which is performed there until July 19th; on the other hand, from the stage of the Liceu, conducting with Symphony No. 8 by Mahler on July 24th.