The sculptor and painter Antonio López lent himself this Thursday to a social and artistic experiment that the Liceu is organizing this week at La Modelo de Barcelona with the intention of “healing a place that is sick”. In the context of the Barcelona Obertura Spring Festival, the Gran Teatre has joined the occupation of emblematic places in the city that the Ciutat de Clàssica parallel circuit generally uses to set up an unusual three-way conversation: between the Castilian artist (and his sculptures), Schubert (and his Winterreise) and the very space of the old prison, in whose tiny cells still resonates, in complete silence, all the anguish of those prisoners who at certain times came to be sixteen where barely four could fit. It was overcrowding or death, since freeing up space meant sending some to shoot Montjuïc.
Last night's experience – repeated Friday and Saturday, doors open at 7 pm and concert at 8 pm – was the wildest proposal in the series of Schubertian winter trips that the Liceu proposes each season in dialogue with a different visual artist . Despite defending himself as positive and vitalist, Antonio López (Tomelloso, 1936) sometimes contributes with his figures and his iconic heads to express the opposite: the idea of the expelled man, abandoned by society, the traveler who undertakes a journey towards death.
The German baritone Benjamin Appl actively participates dressed as a prisoner in the staging in the main gallery of the former prison. A double screen hangs like a guillotine over James Baillieu's piano. Images by video creator Tal Rosner and animations by Bárbara Lluch (Núria Espert's granddaughter) and her team reinterpreting López's work are projected on it. Sometimes in a more contemporary style and other times more realistic, and also making use of resources that evoke the inner world of the prisoners who inhabited the jail and the Schubertian wanderer: the falling snow or the frozen mountain. Generous, Antonio López has given his entire catalog to the artists for this reinterpretation.
The previous day, Wednesday, a new space for concerts had joined those participating in the Ciutat de Clàssica in Barcelona, and it turned out to have unusual acoustics. This is the Glòries tower viewpoint, which you can access after visiting a multimedia exhibition in the basement of Jean Nouvel's building, the Hipermirador Barcelona.
Of all the chamber ensembles programmed in this off of the Spring Festival, the only one that had no connection to the city was performing: the young and already awarded Arete Quartet, from Korea, who made their Spanish debut under the suspended installation Cloud Cities Barcelona, a interactive work by Tomás Saraceno in the form of a spider web of 6 km of cables stretched and connected, forming 113 cloud spaces. Mendelssohn and the Kreutzer Sonata by Leos Janácek played spectacularly in such a place.
This 4th edition of the Ciutat de Clàssica, that part of the festival that reaches out to the public and that has the support of the City Council, comes to an end this weekend having sold out tickets in an hour. 2,700 people have passed through the festival, which still has music at the Mies Van de Rohe and the closing at the Born Center for Culture. This Friday the Spring Festival continues at the Liceu with a recital by Sara Blanch and René Pape, who replaces the announced Xabier Anduaga. And at L'Auditori the pianist Isata Kanneh Mason is a soloist of the OBC.
