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Songs for succulents: Barcelona opera reopens with concert for plants
Barcelona’s Liceu opera reopened its doors on Monday for the first time in over three months post the coronavirus-led lockdown to hold a concert, exclusively for a quiet, leafy audience of nearly 2,300 house plants.
Barcelona’s Liceu opera reopened its doors on Monday for the first time in over three months post the coronavirus-led lockdown to hold a concert, exclusively for a quiet, leafy audience of nearly 2,300 house plants.
Organisers said the intention was to reflect on the absurdity of the human condition in the era of the coronavirus, which deprives people of their position as spectators.
“Nature advanced to occupy the spaces we snatched from it,” executive producer Eugenio Ampudio said on stage at an afternoon rehearsal, where 2,292 nursery plants already occupied every seat before the evening concert.
“Can we extend our empathy? Let’s begin with art and music, in a great theatre, by inviting nature in,” he added inside the eclectic, neo-classical venue that is one of Europe’s largest.
The plants are to be donated to frontline health workers after the concert, live streamed on YouTube.
The Concert for the Biocene was enabled by the end of Spain’s state of emergency on Sunday. It was to feature a string quartet playing Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s Chrysanthemum, chosen for its requiem-like sadness.
The Liceu said it hoped the show would reaffirm the value of art, music and nature and serve as a roadmap for returning to normal activity after the pandemic.
“We are at the end of an entire era and I think that matters a lot,” added Ampudio. “I feel closer to myself being close to plants ... And I feel much closer to people than before, even though I can’t hug them.”
Víctor Garcia de Gomar, artistic director of the Liceu said on the official site, “Eugenio Ampudio’s talent has stimulated him towards new horizons with which he now surprises and challenges us. His testimony delves into the current context and at the same time projects his emotional and intellectual charge in the sphere of collective commitment. In this action at the Liceu he raises many questions about the absurd costume worn by the human condition during this confinement: a public deprived of the possibility of being public.
PHOTOS: A concert for plants at Barcelona’s Liceu opera amid coronavirus pandemic
From his observation of the world as an object, an innovative proposal is born that carries his constant identity as creator. From their resistance to overcoming conventions and repeated gestures, here they also lead us to look at how we relate to space and to reveal the memory of those places. Rethinking the world and its contractions, it surprises us with the Concert for the Biocene. A concert that is perfected with the participation of the vegetable kingdom, while man is a spectator of its social chronicle.”
Spain has been one of the worst-affected nations, with 28,323 deaths and 246,272 cases of the Covid-19 disease so far.
-- with Reuters inputs
