Omega’s 30th anniversary brings its unfinished electricity to the Palau

For Barcelona’s upcoming concert week, Thursday, October 29 through Sunday, November 1, the essential single destination is Friday night’s Omega 30th Anniversary at Palau de la Musica Catalana, also known as Palau de la Música Catalana. The project returns to the album created by Enrique Morente and Granada rock group Lagartija Nick in 1996, whose internal collisions remain its point: flamenco cante and electric force, Federico García Lorca and Leonard Cohen, intensity and formal precision. This is a concert with a real historical charge, yet its value lies in the people carrying it now. Kiki Morente takes the lead-vocal role, placing the work inside the family line while Lagartija Nick supply the band sound that shaped its original identity.^[1][2][4]

The anniversary staging is built around encounters: Morente with Cohen, Morente with Lagartija Nick, and all three currents converging under Lorca’s presence. Palau de la Música Catalana says the programme will perform almost all of Omega and fold in material left off the record but retained within the larger stage work. That makes the evening a living reconstruction with room for theatre, texture and movement, instead of a museum-piece recital. For listeners who know the record closely, that expanded architecture is the reason to go; for newcomers, it offers an unusually direct route into an album whose language has always resisted tidy genre borders.^[1][2]

A Granada work with a Barcelona frame

Omega began as a difficult proposition and eventually became a reference point for Spanish music. Contemporary accounts of the anniversary tour describe how the original joined Lagartija Nick’s electric distortion to Morente’s vocal world, setting Cohen texts beside Lorca’s poetry and flamenco forms. The 30-year context therefore matters: this is a return to a work born from friction, made by musicians willing to let incompatible materials remain audible. In the Palau’s Concert Hall, that friction should feel especially vivid. The room’s ceremonial detail brings a fixed focus to a project that has always treated song as a place where heritage can be stretched, amplified and recast.^[3][4][5]

The current company gives the concept a carefully defined physical form. Antonio Arias handles vocals and bass; Juan Codorniu brings guitar and vocals; Eric Jiménez is on drums; and Juan José Machuca plays keyboards. Israel Galván appears in dance, with Antonio Rey on flamenco guitar, alongside percussion and palmas contributors. Verónica Morales directs the staging, Víctor Martínez is musical director, and Galván also receives the choreography credit. These details matter because Omega has always been larger than a singer-fronted tribute: it needs a band able to hold abrasion and pulse alongside a flamenco ensemble able to shape the air around the voice.^[1]

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Friday, October 30: practical route

Omega 30th Anniversary begins at 21:30 on Friday, October 30, in the Concert Hall at Palau de la Musica Catalana, Carrer del Palau de la Música, 4–6. It forms part of both the 2026 De Cajón! Festival Flamenco de Barcelona and the 58th Barcelona Jazz Festival, a fitting double placement for a work that continues to speak across established categories. The official listing gives ticket prices from €38 to €78 and states that attendees under 16 must enter with a parent or legal guardian. Plan the evening around the full performance, arrive with time for the old-city approach, and recheck the official Palau de la Musica Catalana and promoter pages for tickets, access conditions and any changeable information.^[1][2]

Sources

1. Omega, 30th anniversary — Palau de la Música Catalana
2. OMEGA 30 ANIVERSARIO — TheProject
3. OMEGA — Festival Jazz Barcelona
4. Kiki Morente y Lagartija Nick invocan el espíritu libertario de ‘Omega’ en una gira 30 años después — EL PAÍS
5. Kiki Morente & Lagartija Nick — Teatro de la Maestranza