By Delfin Colome
Spanish Ambassador to Korea
This is not an unusual fact, as it is happening yearly around the end of the winter season: The Daejeon Philharmonic Orchestra is coming to Seoul to play, for the audience of the capital, it's a regular year concert, to show that in Korean cultural life, not only important things are happening in Seoul, but also in the provinces.
You cannot trust the cultural development of a country only by what is presented in the capital. The other communities have to be engaged too; if not, total cultural development will not be completed in a due way.
But the concert this year, to be held tonight (March 14) at the Concert Hall of Seoul Arts Center, has a very special feature.
Since last fall, the Daejeon Philharmonic Orchestra has had a new resident conductor, the very well known Maestro Edmon Colomer (despite the similarity of our own names and the fact that we both are musicians, we are not related).
Colomer, born in Barcelona, Spain, is an outstanding conductor in Europe who quite frequently leads its best orchestras.
In the 1980s, he was given a very important commission by the Spanish government to conduct the newly created Spanish Youth Symphony Orchestra, a project comprising of young musicians from 16 to 23 years old that really changed the scope of music in my country.
But the interesting thing here is that, approximately at the same time, Colomer was also appointed as Chief conductor of a provincial Orchestra in Spain: the Balearic Islands Symphony in the beautiful city of Palma de Mallorca.
With a certain nostalgia, Colomer explained that, the first time he went into his office as the orchestra conductor, at the Balearic Symphony, a portrait hanging in the wall called his attention powerfully.
It was showing the image of a man with clever eyes, almost bald with a large forehead, wearing a very human smile ``Who is this?'' asked Colomer.
``This is Maestro Ahn Eak-tai, a great Korean composer who some years ago founded this orchestra,'' he was answered.
Since then, during his successful career, Maestro Colomer has kept in his memory the inspirational image of Ahn. And, some months ago, when he was engaged by the city of Daejeon, he ``rediscovered'' his lost connection with Korea.
It is very curious how, after so many decades, a Spanish conductor who had the privilege ― at the beginning of his career ― to lead an orchestra founded in Spain by a great Korean conductor, has now the possibility of ``returning'' his artistic capacities to Korean audiences.
Music is mainly art, but it is as well an exercise of communication in which many things can be said.
And I would like, as ambassador of Spain to the Republic of Korea, to communicate my satisfaction tonight, at least for two reasons:
First, because these kind of links, through arts and culture, which always require the involvement of our civil societies, help a lot in the development of our bilateral official relationship.
Second, because they show how our two countries have progressed, in the last decades, in the field of the cultural development, allowing and encouraging the free and permanent presence of high quality artists from both sides ― people all of them, today, with a great international prestige.
I would like the concert tonight to be a real symbol of friendship, of art, of the future. I am sure it will be so!