Vicent Llimerá, director of the Palau de la Música: “Valencian music lovers love Mahler” | News from the Valencian Community

Vicent Llimerá has dedicated himself to the management tasks of the Palau de la Música in Valencia, which he has directed since last year, but he has not forgotten his oboe. “In the car I carry a reed and a reed and I do exercises so as not to lose my muscles,” he comments about the instrument that “most closely resembles the human voice” on which his professional life has revolved. As a child he was “shocked” to see a performance by the soloist of the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert broadcast on TVE and ended up going to the German city in 1984 to study with him. That training or that rehearsal that allowed him to listen almost intimately to the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter conducted by Von Karajan interpreting Bach, marked him professionally and emotionally.

The tastes, however, of this oboe professor at the Joaquín Rodrigo Superior Conservatory of Music, 61, are very eclectic, in line with the baroque or romantic repertoire that he has performed as a soloist in orchestras such as the National, the Valencia or that of Les Arts, or with the contemporary works that he has premiered with the Grup Instrumental. “I also like Morricone and I don’t mind playing her,” he responds, referring to Gabriel’s famous oboe song from the film. The mission. He intends to transfer that eclecticism to the programming of a Palau, in which he already performed the year it opened, in 1987.

The auditorium has once again exceeded a thousand subscribers, after four years closed due to a controversial renovation. “Your audience is changing. Before the closure due to construction (in July 2019) and the coronavirus pandemic, it had a high average age. Unfortunately, many left us because of the virus. Now we are experiencing a generational change, with a young, respectful, educated audience,” comments this musician born in Benaguasil, but raised in Llíria, who recognizes his harmony with the mayor of Valencia, María José Català, of the PP, who appointed him, and to which the oboe “indirectly” joined. “I met her through Manolo Tomás. She was his student,” says Llimerá, who was also director of the Higher Institute of Artistic Education when Catalá recruited him as Minister of Education and Culture. In that political stage prior to the mayor’s office, Tomás already served as his trusted man. Now he is the coordinator of Strategies, Studies and Projects of the City Council.

“The Valencian music lover loves Mahler, Beethoven, the great oratorios and also the piano cycles,” Llimerá points out about the profile of the public. There are a lot of fans in Valencia, percentage-wise more than in Barcelona and Madrid. He maintains that the coexistence of the Palau de les Arts and the Palau de la Música demonstrates this. and gives an example: “Last year we programmed Mahler’s fifth, first as a subscription concert and then as an extraordinary one, and it was also full and this coincided with the premiere of an opera at Les Arts, for which there were no tickets either. ”.

Of the new season, the next Community Day concert stands out, on October 5, with the Novenaby Beethoven, performed by the Valencia Orchestra, its chief conductor, Alexander Liebreich, and the Bayerischen choir, and with the Fantasy for a gentleman for flute and orchestra, by Joaquín Rodrigo. It also considers the program of the main orchestra, the concert conducted by Teodor Currentzis with the Shostakovich Fifth, the visits of great orchestras from Munich, London or Helsinki, or the complete Schumann conducted by Daniele Gatti, with the Sächsische Staatskapelle of Dresden, one of the oldest formations in Europe.

A music scholar, Llimerá explains that the current model of Valencian music bands dates back to the beginning of the 19th century: “The model comes from the French military bands that arrived in Spain with the French occupation and was first adopted at a military level and then by civil society.” A model that took root in the Valencian Community in such a way that musical societies became one of its identifying features.

Like thousands of other wind musicians, Llimerá started in a band, as a child, in the Primitiva de Llíria, with 205 years of history. “When I entered as a child it was a total discovery. Back then there were no social networks, just two television networks. The band was the social meeting point, with my friends, with music, without which life would be very boring.” His wife, however, is a fan of the other great band from Llíria, Unió, with which they maintain a historical rivalry. “It is said that Unió is the best band in the world and I add that Primitiva is the best in Llíria,” he jokes.