ModComFest 2026 Enchants Audiences in Barcelona with Second Chamber Concert
For this second evening, ModComFest brought together another distinguished international ensemble comprising violinists Marc Bouchkov (Belgium), Miguel Colom (Spain), and María Florea (Spain); violists Diemut Poppen (Germany) and Joaquin Riquelme García (Spain); cellists Alexander Chaushian (UK) and Sebastian Klinger (Spain); and pianist Giuliano Mazzoccante (Italy). Together, the musicians presented a programme that moved between Richter’s contemporary chamber writing and works by Eduard Toldrà and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The concert opened with Max Richter’s Autumn Music 2 for piano quartet, immediately placing the focus on this year’s dedicatee. This was followed by another of Richter’s chamber works, A Blessing for string quartet, before the programme turned to Eduard Toldrà’s Vistes al mar, also for string quartet. The evening then broadened in scale with Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence for string sextet, before returning once more to Richter for the closing work, Autumn Music 1 for piano quartet.
Placed together within a single programme, the two Autumn Music works provided a particularly fitting frame for the evening, while A Blessing offered another perspective on Richter’s approach to chamber writing. Heard alongside Toldrà and Tchaikovsky, the three pieces also continued one of the central ideas behind this year’s ModComFest, namely that of presenting the work of a living composer in conversation with different musical traditions, rather than treating contemporary repertoire as something separate from the broader classical canon.
Noting the importance of giving contemporary composers a genuine place within classical programming, violinist George Tudorache remarked that “we should never forget that Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms or Shostakovich were once contemporary composers themselves. Today, I think we have a responsibility not only to preserve this extraordinary heritage, but also to remain curious and open to the musical language of our own generation. Playing contemporary music develops our flexibility, our imagination, our sense of colour, rhythm, and sound. It forces us to listen differently and sometimes to discover completely new ways of expressing ourselves through our instruments.”
“Most importantly”, he continued, “living composers need musicians and festivals like ModComFest to give their music a voice. If we only perform the masterpieces of the past, we do not give the composers of today the opportunity to express their own originality and perhaps create the masterpieces of tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, reflecting on the second day of the festival, Konstantin Ishkhanov, President of ModComFest, commented that “one of the great pleasures of a festival like this is seeing how each concert gradually adds another layer to the portrait we are creating of the composer. Tonight’s programme showed a different side of Max Richter’s music from what audiences experienced on our opening evening, and the exceptional musicians on stage brought a great sense of intimacy and dialogue to these works. It is exactly this kind of sustained exploration that ModComFest was created to make possible.”
With two concerts now complete, ModComFest 2026 will return to the Hospital de Sant Pau on 19th September for the final event of its chamber series. The festival will then move to the Palau de la Música Catalana, where three orchestral concerts from 21st to 23rd September will bring the second half of this year’s programme to life.
