Dilip Kuner
BARCELONA’S Liceu opera house is reopening on Monday (June 22) with a concert in front of a planted audience.
Attendees won’t need to bother with masks or gloves, or even maintain social distancing.
On the other hand applause will be muted as the attendees will be restricted to 2,292 potted plants.
A string quartet will serenade them with Puccini’s Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums). More sentient music lovers will be able to enjoy the performance via a live stream.
The Liceu’s artistic director, Víctor García de Gomar, says that the Concert for the Biocene is intended to reflect how in lockdown, we have become “an audience deprived of the possibility of being an audience.”
Eugenio Ampudia, the conceptual artist behind the concert, said : “At a time when an important part of humankind has shut itself up in enclosed spaces and been obliged to relinquish movement, nature has crept forward to occupy the spaces we have ceded.
“And it has done so at its own rhythm, according to its patient biological cycle. Can we broaden our empathy and bring it to bear on other species? Let’s start by using art and music and inviting nature into a great concert hall.”
