On 5 May 2025, the Gran Teatre del Liceu presents its 2025/26 season, a particularly significant programme marking the culmination of Josep Pons’s fourteen years as Music Director. The season places the Gran Teatre del Liceu Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at its centre and brings to a close a long-term project devoted to strengthening their artistic standards, distinctive sound and international profile.
The season opens on 22 September 2025 with Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, conducted by Josep Pons. Barrie Kosky’s production, originally created for the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, offers a poetic and symbolic reflection on the cycle of life, nature and the relationship between humans and animals. The cast is led by Elena Tsallagova, Angela Brower and Peter Mattei.
Another major project is Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, in a production by Àlex Ollé. Asmik Grigorian appears in the title role alongside Joshua Guerrero as Des Grieux. The staging explores Manon’s vulnerability and the conflict between desire, frivolity and a passion that ultimately leads the characters towards destruction.
Towards the end of the season, Josep Pons conducts Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff in Laurent Pelly’s production. With Luca Salsi and Ambrogio Maestri alternating in the title role, the performances mark his operatic farewell as Music Director of the Liceu. Verdi’s final opera, combining humour, wisdom and extraordinary theatrical vitality, becomes the work chosen to conclude his fourteen-year tenure.
The symphonic repertoire occupies a central place in the farewell season. Before its official opening, on 6 September 2025, Josep Pons conducts the Liceu Orchestra and Chorus at the Basilica of Santa Maria de Montserrat in Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection”, as part of the Montserrat Millennium celebrations.
During the season, the Mahler Universe project reaches its culmination with Symphonies Nos. 9 and 8, “Symphony of a Thousand.” The Eighth, scheduled for 24 July 2026, is presented as the principal farewell concert and a tribute to Josep Pons’s fourteen years of dedication to the Liceu. The performance brings together the theatre’s orchestra and chorus, several additional choirs and a large cast of soloists in one of the most monumental works in the symphonic repertoire.
Josep Pons also leads other projects during the season, including the Family Symphony Concert, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Petit Liceu, and the musical direction of John Neumeier’s Nijinsky with the Hamburg Ballet. These projects reflect the breadth of an artistic vision encompassing opera, symphonic music, dance and musical outreach.
Since becoming Music Director in 2012, Josep Pons has led a sustained process of transformation and consolidation of the theatre’s resident ensembles. During this period, the Orchestra and Chorus expand their repertoire, strengthen their artistic identity and tackle major works by Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Berg, Debussy, Shostakovich, Puccini and Verdi.
The 2025/26 season is therefore conceived as both a culmination and an opportunity to reflect on this journey. Rather than a transitional year, it represents the conclusion of a defining chapter in the recent history of the Gran Teatre del Liceu and a celebration of a musical project built over fourteen years with the orchestra, chorus and the institution as a whole.