Roberts Balanas — 17 November 2026, Petit Palau (Barcelona)

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One violin and electronics across seven centuries: from the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat to Steve Reich, Radiohead, Björk and Sílvia Pérez Cruz

Latvian violinist Roberts Balanas plays the Petit Palau on Tuesday 17 November at eight in the evening. Tickets are €35, the recital runs ninety minutes without an interval and the Festival Sant Pau promotes it, programming the night within its own series.

The programme holds seven pieces and one instrument with electronics. It opens with Balanas’s own recomposition of the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat and goes on to Steve Reich’s “Violin Phase”, Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”, Björk’s “The Anchor Song”, a new work by Jabeau, Reich’s “New York Counterpoint” and “Moreno” by Sílvia Pérez Cruz. All the arrangements are Balanas’s. Pérez Cruz does not perform: she is there as a composer only.

The Jabeau piece gets its Spanish premiere here. It was commissioned by the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, which gives the world premiere on 8 October at the Snellman Hall in Kokkola, Finland, in a version for violin, electronics and string orchestra. That programme is billed as “Counterpoint” and shares a bill with Bach’s concerto for two violins and an arrangement of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. At the Petit Palau, Balanas is on his own.

The Palau describes the thread as counterpoint “not only as a musical technique but also as a play of contrasts, superpositions and dialogues between seemingly distant musics”.

It is not the first time Balanas has played the building: on 8 March this year he gave the Spanish premiere of Angela Luq’s concerto “Machina Humana” in the main hall, on a programme that closed with Mozart’s Requiem. In November the violin will be the only instrument on stage.

Text by Marçal Bonastre