Sculptor and painter Antonio López lent himself yesterday to a social and artistic experiment that the Liceu is organizing this week at La Model 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 added to the occupation of emblematic places in the city that generally takes the Ciutat de Clàssica circuit of free concerts in order to set up an unusual three-way conversation: between the Castilian artist (and his sculptures), Schubert (and his Winterreise) and the same space of the old prison, in the tiny cells where all the anguish of those prisoners still resonates, in complete silence that at certain times there were sixteen where there was barely room for four. It was overcrowding or death, since freeing up space meant sending some of them to shoot Montjuïc.
Last night's experience – repeated today and tomorrow, at 7 p.m. doors open and at 8 p.m. concert – was the wildest proposal in the series of Schubertian winter trips that the Liceu proposes every season in dialogue with a different visual artist. Despite defending himself as a positive and vitalist, Antonio López (Tomelloso, 1936) sometimes contributes with his figures and iconic heads to express the opposite: the idea of the man expelled, abandoned by society, the walker who undertakes the journey to death.
The German baritone Benjamin Appl takes an active part dressed as a prisoner in the staging in the main gallery of the former penitentiary. A double flat screen falls 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 are projected, reinterpreting López's work. Sometimes in a more contemporary style and others more realistic, also using resources that evoke the inner world of both the prisoners who were the center and the Schubertian wanderer: the falling snow, the frozen mountain... Generós, Antonio López has given his entire catalog to the artists for this reinterpretation.
The day before, a new space for concerts had been added in Barcelona to those participating in the Ciutat de Clàssica, and it turned out that it had unusual acoustics. This is the viewpoint of the Glòries tower, which is accessed after visiting a multimedia exhibition in the basement of Jean Nouvel's building, the Hipermirador Barcelona.
Of all the chamber ensembles scheduled for this off season of the Spring Festival, the only one performing that has no ties to the city: the young and already award-winning Arete Quartet from Korea, who made their Spanish debut under the suspended installation Cloud Cities Barcelona, an interactive work by Tomás Saraceno that is a web of 6 km of tensioned and connected cables, forming 113 cloud spaces. He presented a complex and spectacular program: Mendelssohn and the Kreutzer Sonata by Leos Janácek.
This 4th edition of the Ciutat de Clàssica, which has the support of the City Council, comes to an end this weekend, having sold out in an hour. 2,700 people have passed through the festival, which still has concerts at the weekend at the Mies Van de Rohe and the Born Center de Cultura.
At the Liceu, Spring continues today with Sara Blanch and René Pape, who replaces the announced Xabier Anduaga, and at L'Auditori the OBC soloist is the pianist Isata Kanneh Mason.
