25 years after the original release of the lead single, Queen singer Freddie Mercury's most self-defining and personal work, his ‘Barcelona’ album recorded in collaboration with Spanish operatic soprano Montserrat Caball , is having a special re-release in an entirely newly orchestrated re-working.The original Barcelona album, named after the Spanish city who would host the Olympics in 1992 and for which Mercury had been asked to write the theme song, was to become the final solo work Mercury would complete.

The title was also a tribute to the home city of his beloved recording partner Montserrat Caball with whom Freddie was captivated and had planned to perform the title song with at the opening of the 1992 Olympics opening ceremony. Sadly Mercury passed away eight months before this could happen. But the album gave Mercury a million selling record and posthumously a chart topping single when the song Barcelona was chosen by BBC TV as its title music to its coverage of the Olympics.One of the most audacious, and groundbreaking musical collaborations of the 80's, ‘Barcelona’ was for Freddie the embodiment of his long held fantasy of combining rock and opera and realizing his dream of collaborating with the woman of whom he said after first seeing her performing at London's Royal Opera House in 1981, ‘I have now heard the best voice in the world’. Freddie had gone to the Opera House to see Luciano Pavarotti in Verdi's ‘Un ballo in maschera’. Freddie had heard him on record but never seen him live. However, as impressive as Pavarotti clearly was, it was the mezzo soprano who blew Freddie away.He was later to play his manager Jim Beach a record of Montserrat Caball . “I wish to record with her”, Freddie told an astonished Jim. “Please arrange it.”