Pere-Albert Balcells (Barcelona, 1957) is a music teacher, researcher and musical disseminator.
In the educational field, he has worked at Barcelona Centre for Music Studies, Escolania de Montserrat Boys’ Choir and Àngel Soler Music Studio. He has also dedicated himself to specialised teaching, particularly through courses focussed on the works of Mozart.
As a disseminator, he has collaborated with various musical institutions, such as the Auditori de Barcelona and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, linked to the dissemination of classical music with the aim of making it accessible to a wide audience.
He has also contributed to Catalunya Música, the Catalan classical music radio station. In this field, he has worked as a writer and a commentator for concerts of the Barcelona Symphony and Catalonia National Orchestra.
He is author of the radio series Atentament, Amadeus, a collection of programmes that traverse the life of Mozart year by year and show the creation of the major works of each period in the context of the successive biographical developments. The series aired during Mozart Year 2006.
In the research field, he is author of the book AUTORETRAT DE MOZART, a través de la seva correspondència (SELF-PORTRAIT OF MOZART, through his correspondence) (Catalan version: Ed. La Campana, 1997; Spanish version, ed. Quaderns Crema, 2000/2019), an approach to the man himself and the musical aesthetic of the genius from Salzburg. This piece of work is appreciated by critics for his innovative approach, not based on a conventional biographical model but rather a character portrait extracted directly from the composer’s own words and his closest relatives and friends, which are collected in the extensive legacy of Mozart’s correspondence. For this study, he translated a significant amount of this epistolary collection from German to Catalan and Spanish.
He is also author of a series of four books on the four most well-known Mozart operas: Escoltar Les noces de Fígaro de Mozart, Escoltar el Don Giovanni de Mozart, Escoltar el Così fan tutte de Mozart and Escoltar La flauta màgica de Mozart (Listen to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Listen to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Listen to Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte and Listen to Mozart’s The Magic Flute-version in Catalan and Spanish: Ed. Dinsic. 2000), four monographs which, using accessible language, invite the reader to listen to these operas with the aim of exploring their unlimited reserves of musical dramaturgy.