Opus One performs Mike Oldfield's Ommadawn

Xavier Alern
7 hours ago
2 min read

On February 13, 2026, at 8:00 p.m., the Opus One orchestra will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of this great album by Mike Oldfield with a concert at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona.

Rosa Cedrón, Bieito Romero and the African percussion quartet Djilandiang will be the artists invited to participate in the event.

Ommadawn (Photo: David Bailey) — *Ommadawn* (Photo: David Bailey)

In 1975, Ommadawn, Mike Oldfield's third solo album, was released. Disgusted by the criticism received by his previous album, Hergest Ridge (1974), Oldfield worked hard on this new work. As much as he did on Tubular Bells (1973), as he himself admits. Although Oldfield's fame is mainly due to his debut work, Ommadawn established the young composer as an indisputable musical genius, which allowed him to take a three-year break until releasing his next album, Incantations (1978). It is no exaggeration to say that, today, Ommadawn is the favorite album of many of the Mike Oldfield's followers.

Opus One celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Tubular Bells by officially presenting themselves at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona on 13 June 2023 and with a streaming concert on 25 May of that same year. They later celebrated the 50th anniversary of Hergest Ridge on 11 November 2024, also at the Palau de la Música, and will now complete Mike Oldfield's "magic trilogy" with this third concert.

The Palau de la Música Catalana has been the only auditorium in the world to have programmed the fiftieth anniversary of the trilogy, and has done so by trusting Opus One to carry it out.

For this concert we will have the singer Rosa Cedrón, who collaborated with Mike Oldfield in the recording of the album Tubular Bells III (1998) and participated in the tour of The Night of the Proms in Spain. Also performing will be Bieito Romero, bagpiper and leader of the folk group Luar na Lubre. Oldfield covered a song by Romero, O son do Ar, for his album Voyager (1996). The guest list is rounded out by the Senegalese percussion quartet Djilandiang, led by Bamba Lamine Mane, who will perform the passage originally recorded by Jabula.