The XLIV edition of the Pollença Festival is going to have a spectacular start. Wednesday the 13th July 2005 Saint Domingo's Cloister is going to welcome the opening display with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic taking the chief role, directed by Yuri Temirkanov. Before the parenthesis that point the patron saint festivities, the Brubeck Quartet on the 16th July and the Coral Chamber Group of Pamplona on Saturday the 23rd July are going to march past Saint Domingo's.

     The triple that will open the XLIV Pollença Festival points the path to the other eight concerts until the closing ceremony on the 31st August with the Philarmonisches Klavierquartet Berlin prevailing from 1985 as a music association of chamber-music of the Berlin Philharmonic.

     Beginning the series with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic leaves the priority of the artistic director Eugen Prokop clear which is no other than making the coming back easier to Saint Domingo's Cloister to big orchestral ensembles. The evidence is the constant presence of an orchestra in the bills from 2002. First, it was the London Symphony Orchestra, that due to the rain was taken to the Auditorium in Palma, and in 2003 the Symphonic of the Balearic Islands came back to the Cloister making an exception with the soloist Mischa Maiski.

     Last year, coinciding with the celebration of a double centenary which remembered both the death of Antonin Dvorak and the birth of Philip Newman, founder of Pollença's Festival, we had the Praga Symphonic Orchestra and -as it could not be in any other way- the invited soloist Llya Gringolts, violinist like Philip Newman.

     Perhaps the moment to give Pollença back the splendour of the end of the 80's has arrived, when marched through Saint Domingo's Cloister formations of great prestige like the Symphonic Orchestra of the Sovietic Radio, the Philharmonic of the European Union, the Czech Philharmonic, the Pittsbugh Symphony Orchestra, the Salzburg Mozarteum, the National Hungary Philharmonic or the National Orchestra of France.

     Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the oldest symphonic ensemble of Russia, has its origins at the beginning of the XIX century when a group of aristocrats founded in 1802 the first philharmonic society in Europe. Yuri Temirkanov is its titular director since 1988. The programme that will be represented in Pollença includes Prokofiev's concert for violin, with Boris Belkin as its soloist.

     Pay attention to the Brubeck Quartet that will play the jazzistic note in the XLIV edition of the Pollença Festival, with two of the sons of the mythical Dave Brubeck, Chris and Dan, playing part in it, and closing the quartet Mike de Micco and Chuck Lamb.

     We can neither leave behind the Coral Chamber Group of Pamplona which acquired international notoriety in 1950 when they won the first prize in the International Singing Contest in the city of Lille.