Since its foundation in Barcelona in 1987 by Montserrat Figueras and Jordi Savall, the chamber choir La Capella Reial de Catalunya has carried out, both at home and around the world, a busy schedule of numerous concert and recording activities in the field of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Classical music. Over the past 35 years, the ensemble, made up professional young solo vocalists (usually numbering 20 to 25 singers) has played an essential role in the recovery and dissemination of the Catalan, Hispanic and European musical heritage, a task that is reflected in more than 50 CDs available in the ALIA VOX catalogue.
Since 2020 and during 2021, during the preparation and execution of new projects focusing on the recovery of the “original historical sound” of choral and orchestral repertories of the 19th century such as Joseph Haydn’s The Creation and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and also in the preparation of future programmes with choral works by Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Bruckner and Brahms, we realized that we needed a larger, more ambitious professional choir capable of meeting the challenge of these new musical repertories with distinction.
It was in 2021, during the preparations for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, it was decided to build on the nucleus of La Capella Reial de Catalunya’s 25 voices to create La Capella Nacional de Catalunya, a new professional vocal ensemble comprising 40 young singers. Following various auditions held in Paris and Barcelona for professional young singers with specialist training in the vocal music of the 18th and 19th centuries, we were able to select 15 new young vocalists, who, together with the existing body of singers, will constitute Catalonia’s first totally professional choir specialized in historically-informed performance practice.
La Capella Nacional de Catalunya marks the culmination of the experience accumulated in our preceding academies – a pedagogical initiative with the aim of recovering the European and world musical heritage through the reconstruction of period performance techniques, as well as transmitting those techniques to younger generations and disseminating the results to an increasingly large, diverse and varied audience. The conjunction of internationally renowned musicians and young professional musicians in the orchestra directed by maestro Jordi Savall is complemented with the incorporation of a professional choir of young vocalists, thus creating a unique and exceptional set of conditions which enable us to approach the music and its expressive power as it sounded in the period in which it was composed, thanks to a creative undertaking of the utmost historical fidelity and artistic excellence.
