London Philharmonic joins the expanding Casals150 programme

The London Philharmonic Orchestra will take part in the Casals150 commemoration with a Madrid concert on 28 October 2026, as an international programme marking the cellist’s 150th birth anniversary continues to expand.

Edward Gardner conducts at the Auditorio Nacional, with Julia Fischer and Daniel Müller-Schott in Brahms’s Double Concerto. The evening opens with the Prelude from Casals’s El Pessebre and concludes with Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, placing Casals’s own composing within a broader orchestral programme.

The Pau Casals Foundation recently presented the commemoration at Madrid’s Instituto Cervantes. More than 230 activities are planned through October 2027, with concerts, exhibitions and discussions exploring the musician’s artistic work alongside his advocacy for peace and human rights.

Organisers report that activities held so far have attracted more than 23,600 people, including almost 8,000 outside Spain. The Instituto Cervantes will contribute to the international programme through events in different cities.

Further plans include a Quartet Casals concert at United Nations headquarters in New York on 7 December and a Madrid exhibition opening in February 2027. A later RTVE programme is set to revisit Casals’s early composition La visión de Fray Martín.

An anniversary of this scale can easily become a sequence of tributes. The more interesting possibility is that the programming will let listeners encounter different parts of Casals’s life together: performer, composer, teacher and public advocate.

The London Philharmonic’s programme offers one compact example. Hearing a work by Casals before Brahms and Sibelius gives his music a place within the evening’s artistic argument, rather than leaving his name solely on the commemorative banner. The wider programme will test how effectively that approach can travel across institutions and countries.