At the beginning of January René Jacobs, the celebrated counter-tenor and one of the besr specialized conductors of baroque music, took to the podium at the Palau de la Música, Valencia, to conduct the concerto version of Orfeo ed Euridice by Gluck, wirh the Argentinean trio of soloists Bernarda Fink, Verónica Cangemi, and María Cristina Kiehr. AIso in January, as part of the Palau 2000 cycle, the pianisr Alicia de Larrocha appeared in Barcelona and performed music by Enrique Granados with the Goyescas cycle as the center piece. Finally, for rhis month, rhe French contra!to Nathalie Stutzmann came to rhe Palau de la Música in Barcelona, to perform a program comprising works by Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, and Francis Poulenc, accompanied on piano by rnger Si:idergren.