Our two weeks in Barcelona have flown by.
And I have some catching up to do in my reporting.
Friday night, Wesley took us to see and to hear the Vienna Philharmonic. The venue was the Palau de la Música Catalana. It is a gorgeous theatre. Jaw-droppingly so. And it is difficult to overstate the joy that washes over you when you approach and enter this theater.
We are all familiar with old European theaters. They are formal. Velvet curtained. Gold leafed. With Royal boxes. This theater is not like that, at all. It is like no theater anywhere else on the planet. It is "irrational exuberance" in the form of architecture. Inside and out it is a fantasy of ceramic and wood and glass and stone, materials manipulated into shapes and forms that seduce the eye. Flowers and horses and murals and mosaic depictions of the muses whose upper torsos burst out of the wall as stone statues with instruments in their hands.
Palau de Musica anticipating the Vienna Philharmonic
Lighting detail Who would build such a theater? And why so over the top expressive?
Ceiling detail
The Orfeó Català built it for themselves. A place to perform Catalan music, specifically, Catalan choral music. Orfeó Català was a choral society. Still in existence, they formed in 1891 as part of the Renaixença, the Catalan Renaissance which celebrated the end of a two-hundred year decline of Catalan culture caused by Phillip V when he outlawed all Catalan expression in 1714. In a burst of Catalan pride, the Orfeó Català decided to erect a shrine to their national music. They raised money and asked architect, Lluis Domènech i Montaner to build a concert hall.
Barcelona in that decade was teeming talent. Antoni Gaudí was sculpting his wavy stone master-piece buildings. Picasso had his first solo show in the city. Joan Miró entered the Fine Arts Academy. And Pablo Casals was an international cello celebrity and a Catalan booster par excellence. The Palau architect selected from the pool of gifted local artisans. Master makers of ceramic tiles and art glass. And stone carvers, expert in the undulating style of stone masonry popular in 1900's Barcelona. The end result is more than a pleasure to sit in. I know it is a lot of superlatives, but come see the Palau and you will understand.
Tapas before the concert
Back to our concert experience. When listening to an orchestra, it is a particular thrill to feel as if you are in the center of it so that when they play full force you feel the force of the vibrations shake your skeleton. Our seats had that feel. We were in the three slender, high, curved rows that are on either side of the organ and are about a dozen feet above the orchestra.
The first half of the program was the second symphony of Johannes Brahms, 1833 to 1897. It was written for the Vienna Philharmonic. They premiered it in 1877. One could say the music of Brahms is in their blood, in their DNA. There were elderly gentlemen in the string section and it is not a stretch to imagine that their grandfathers played in the orchestra during Brahms's lifetime. And maybe even on the same instruments. The Vienna Philharmonic owns all of the string instruments used in it's performances. That is how it retains it's string sound which is say is magnificent. So the first half of the concert was lovely. Did it knock our socks off? No. But let's wait to hear the second half.
Moments later......After intermission they played the fourth symphony by Brahms and it was as if during intermission they practiced or they drank triple expressos. They evolved into super-orchestra. On the edges of their seats they passionately poured their hearts out. Like a school of fish. They turned on a dime. Played like a single organism improvising the symphony for us on the spot. I do not credit the conductor. They played as if eyes closed they knew exactly how to get to their destination. It all sounded inevitable. Like that is the way that symphony has to sound. And maybe they are right. It seemed so to us. We were more than satisfied. Sitting almost snuggled side by side in our tightly placed seats we were in sonic heaven. All was right with the world. Especially so in the second movement where the strings played pizzicato so gently it would soothe a baby in a cradle and the winds played in a delicate whisper of sound that caressed our ears and literally made us feel good all over.
Barcelonetta Beach, Sept 30, 2102
Wes made a great choice. It was a special night out for us.
Life is good. Very good.
Marlow and Wes
29 September 2012
Barcelona
Palau de la Musica Catalana
Vienna Philharmonic
Sunday, September 30, 2012
29 Sept 2012, Barcelona, Vienna Phil
30 September 2012, Saturday, Barceloneta
We are sitting on the sand at a table under an umbrella 70 feet from the blue water of the Mediterranean Sea at Barceloneta Beach. Roland is with us. He arrived last night from Los Angeles.
Since we are at the sea we chose to eat seafood. The tastiest mussels. Plump. Orange. Glistening with fresh sea water in the shells. Sardines. Catch of the day. Lightly grilled with coarse salt. Sweet and fleshy. The ever present Pimientos de Padron, sauteed and salted. Leeks. Slow braised till tender enough to cut with a fork. On a bed of Jamon Iberico and sprinkled with fresh roasted hazelnuts.
Our restaurant today is "Ca la Nuri". In Catalan: House of Nuri. It is a few feet away from the large copper sculpture by Frank Gehry that people call "the fish". But really to me, up close, looks like a conquistador's helmet. At this moment my table mates have abandoned me for the bicycles.
Signing off from Barceloneta. Marlow. 3:00 p.m. 30 September 2012. Saturday.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
24 Sept 2012 M&W in Barcelona, Part 2
It is Monday, September 24, 2012 and we have completed our first week of residence in Barcelona. We are settled in. We do our laundry. We take the buses. We shop for groceries--vegetables, meats, cheeses, vinos, artisanal gelato, organic expresso, eggs from "liberated" chickens (i.e. free range.) And for the past four days we have been surrounded by the intense revelry of the locals during the city wide Mercé Festival.
During the past 2000 years Barcelona has had two patron saints. For the first 1700 years it was Eulàlia. Then Mercé came along and took the job from Eulàlia. It is said that the raindrops that fall on the Mercé Festival are the tears of Santa Eulàlia still sad at having been replaced.
The Mercé Festival was a religious festival. Nowadays, it is non-religious and more or less a gift from the city to the people. For four days, from 10 a.m. until past midnight, in the Ciutadella Park, in the public plazas, at Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral, on the major thorough-fares there are hundreds of events. Concerts of folk music, rap, salsa, rock and roll. Light shows. Moving pictures projected on the facade of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral. Contests to see who can make the tallest human tower. They call them castells. The tallest are ten tiers with four people on each tier. The castell is complete when the small--lightweight--young child climbs atop everyone and raises his or her arm. The crowd goes wild and the humans slide down the tier level by level. There is a parade of larger then life fire breathing dragons that menace the crowd--safely, of course. And another parade of giant people which are statues twelveifeet tall. People climb into them and walk waving the arms and moving the heads. There are tap dancers moving to Glenn Miller played by a large live symphonic wind band. And kooky mini-theaters built inside mobile trailers. They seat about a dozen people and put on puppet shows and artsy films. There is the ground-level movie screen with a camera in the center which captures the passers-by on the screen then somehow moves their heads onto different bodies. Fireworks, of course, there are tremendous fireworks displays and for the price of your empty glass all the champagne you can drink. You just return over and over to the champagne tent for refills. Actually, it is not champagne, it is cava, sparkling spanish wine made in Catalonia. All of that and more was swirling about us for four days. It was surreal. At times, it was sensory overload, but it was a great display of the locals coming out en masse to "forget your troubles, come on get happy" all paid for by the city.
Concurrent with that, I, as usual, have been soaking up the local history, the most recent 800 years which is the age of our particular neighborhood which is called, El Born. Born is from the verb, bornar: "to celebrate tournaments, which included jousts, popular feasts, processions, and other public events". It is said that Don Quixote jousted here. The star character of the Cervantes novel got into lots of trouble on the streets where we live. He may have been a work of fiction, but Cervantes describes well the ambiance of the neighborhood in 1500.
Wes stayed in this apartment two years ago. He loved the neighborhood so much that he is back and this time I am with him. The Born ambiance is a bit like The Village in Manhattan. It is compact. There are a lot of casual coffee houses and eateries. And overall there is a creative aspect in the air. Our 19th-Century building has an elegant facade. Rows and rows of tall stone arches running for blocks. It is visually attractive.
Our particular apartment, from where I am writing, is on the third of five floors. I am looking through nine-foot tall glass doors, through the elegant wrought iron railing on the terrace and through autumnal chestnut trees onto the Ciutadella Park and to the blue sky beyond. The iPod is playing spanish piano music. The pianist is Barcelona's native born treasure, Alicia de Larrocha. She may have been only five-feet tall, but she played like a goddess.
Now for some description of the El Born neighborhood. I may ramble. I may digress. There may be sidebars. I am known for: why use one word when you can use ten. So settle in. Grab a pillow. Fall asleep if you like. My feelings won't be hurt. Instead, I will be pleased to provide you with a good nap. Okay, let' go.......
El Born is anchored by four major elements. They are situated in one trajectory that is maybe 1 mile and a half. The four elements are the Ciutadella (Citadel) Park. The Born Market. The Passeig del Born. And the Santa Maria del Mar Church.
The oldest of the four is the Santa Maria del Mar Church. It was built by Alfons the Good, King of Aragon to celebrate the conquest of Sardinia. It's first stone was laid on March 25, 1329 and it's last stone on November 3, 1383. The site had been a place of reverence since the year 100 when, on it, a Roman Necropolis was built to house the bones of Santa Eulàlia, the patron saint of Barcelona. (Remember her?) The Santa Maria del Mar church is a wonderful gothic structure. Inside, it is tall and has long lines, spacious and airy. Up until 1930 it had fascinating art and furnishings. But the during the Spanish Civil War, Generalissimo Franco sent people in to burn what had survived for 600 years.
The church has been the focal point of the neighborhood now for 630 years. Back in the old days this was the neighborhood of artisans and craftspeople. People who built things. We visited the church yesterday to note a few things. There are two plaques near the entrance. They were carved and installed when the church opened to say so and so built this for such and such a reason. Interestingly, one plaque is in Castilian (Spanish) and the other, in Catalan. The city was bilingual. The other thing we looked for was something on the front door. When something expensive is built, the biggest contributors are acknowledged, but if your contribution is not money, but let's say labor, let's say, stone masonry, the way they were acknowledged for their volunteered labor was to cast small brass plaques in the shape of a mason with a stone on his back. There are two such plaques installed on the upper part of the grand front doors to the church. It is very sweet to see 630 years later.
Let us move onto the second element of the neighborhood. Many of the streets are not wide enough for a car to pass, but the pedestrian street that emanates from the church widens considerably and is called Passeig del Born. Passeig is Catalan for "avenue" and Born, remember, is from the verb, bornar: to celebrate tournaments, jousts, etc. Specifically, this little quarter-mile stretch of widened street was where the jousts were held. Horses. Armor. Guys with long pointy tipped polls trying to poke their opponents. Makes me want to read about it in Don Quixote!
So this street, Passeig del Born, which begins at the church, ends at a structure called, the Born Market, the third element in the neighborhood.
The Born Market was built in 1878 and offered fruits and vegetables to the neighborhood until it closed in 1977. It may have been in a state of major disrepair, but the building had great bones. It was worth saving. Here are some words from a website about the structure: "A building of extraordinary lightness and transparency due to the slender metal columns and the light that filters through the slatted shutters around the side...the roof is laid with red and green tiles in a mosaic pattern...a cupola and crow's nest crowns the pinnacle....it's spacious interior has earned it the name of Cathedral of Iron and Glass." The city government decided to save the building, to repurpose it into a library. So in 2002 they began they restoration. During the excavation they found something remarkable.
Let's turn back the hands of time to the year 1700. Carlos II, the King of Aragon and ruler of Barcelona died. He died without an heir. Their was an opportunity for someone to become king. The royal families in France and Austria had many willing, chomping at the bit, candidates. The French King Louis XIV sent his grandson, Phillip of Anjou. The Austrian Hapsburg Emperor, Leopold I, sent his son, Archduke Charles. There was trouble--known as The War of Succession. For a dozen years the two skirmished. A political wrestling match with guns and blood and vendettas. Eventually, Austrian Archduke Charles quit to take a job as Holy Roman Emperor. On September 11, 1714, Phillip became King Felipe V of Aragon , ruler of Barcelona, and had a lot of scores to settle with the local population who had not sided with him which was most of the El Born neighborhood. From 1717 to 1719 he set about razing the El Born neighborhood. By razing I mean bulldozing, flattening, leveling, destroying. It was typical at that time that if you won a battle you destroyed your opponents castle or in this instance all of their homes. And not just their homes. King Felipe V banned the Catalan language, dissolved the local government, closed the university and executed his opponents.
So, back to the Born Market. In 2002, during excavations, they discovered directly beneath the market, the ruins of fifty structures and the paved roads that ran between them. The structures were medieval homes, stores and artisan workshops. And there were household items and artisan tools. A wealth of evidence of life before 1717. The building will begin it's new life as a center for Catalan culture. You will be able to descend a stairwell into the old city ruins. This will all come to pass on September 11, 2014, the 300th anniversary of Felipe V coming to power. This market is adjacent to our apartment.
And now for the fourth element of the neighborhood, the Ciutadella Park. Ciutadella means Citadel as in military fortress. Felipe V built a monumental fortress from which to rule over what he called the savage population of Barcelona. The fortress no longer exists. In it's place is a large public park. The park where much of the Mercé Festival occurred. It is an are beloved by the locals. And it is all built above the ruins of their ancestors homes. And that is what our lovely apartment balcony looks upon.
Marlow and Wes
24 September 2012
Barcelona
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Friday, September 21, 2012
Our apartment block in Barcelona
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Marlow and Wes, Barcelona, 18 September 2012
It is 8:15 p.m. We are in Barcelona. It is twilight. We are sitting in a plaza, a small plaza--there are hundreds of them--under a canopy of leafy trees, chestnut and palm.
There is a gentle breeze and the sky looks like rain.
Barcelona is old. When Emperor Augustus established an official city here two-thousand years ago--yes, 2000 years ago, old, old, old--there were pre-existing villages many centuries old established atop Montjuic.
This particular part of Barcelona--where we sit, the part visited by travelers--is a maze of narrow streets-too narrow for cars. The streets twist this way and that without right-angles. Getting lost is easy and if you land in an unusually attractive area it is fun, but if you arrive at a gritty, urban, street-urchiny dimly-lit alley it is scary; at least to me it is.
Currently it is 8:15 p.m., too early for dinner for the locals. Instead we are having wine and tapas. The wine is Rioja Crianza. Rioja is the region and Crianza indicates a style of wine-making (aged two-years with at least six-months in oak). Our tapas are two small dishes: 1) Chistorra ala sidra (thin, salty sausage, grilled with cider, sliced into chunky discs); and 2) Escalivada con queso de cabra (mixed vegetables--usually eggplant and red peppers--foil wrapped and roasted till they dissolve--topped with goat cheese and put under the broiler).
Life is good.
Our stay in New York City was marked by good weather, good food and a very good play. The play, "Grace", has four characters: a husband; a wife; a disfigured neighbor; and an exterminator, Ed Asner. They grapple with finding religion, losing it, and general meaning-of-life issues. The playwrite (how does one spell playwrite?) In an interview said, "at the present time America is having an on-going conversation about whether it is a secular democracy or a religious theocracy". I am loosely quoting him and I read his words after seeing his play, but he delivered his thesis with a touch that was light, clear and articulate.
But back to Barcelona, on these ultra-narrow streets the buildings on either side are consistently three to four to five floors tall with balconies often hung heavily with drying laundry. It rains frequently. The streets below the balconies are somewhat dark, but clean. Very clean. Every day we see mini-street-cleaning vehicles accompanied by a footman with a high-powered hose traversing the pathways' nooks and crannies.
Although summer has passed and autumn has begun, the locals are still dressed in shorts, tee-shirts and sandals. And I must say, at the risk of generalizing, the Spanish, the Catalan people--men and women--are very handsome.
"Catalan," for the unfamiliar, is the name of this region and of it's language and of it's culture. The language began one-thousand years ago as a spoken tongue. Two-hundred years later it evolved into a written language with it's own poetry and literature.
Several times the Catalan culture and language were under threat of extinction, but it's hold on the local people is so strong it could not be exterminated. When threatened it went into hiding in the mountain villages one in particular, Montserrat, the site of a legendary monastery where Catalan was preserved while it was outlawed by the government of that time. Today, though everyone speaks Spanish (or as it is called here, Castilian) the semi-official language is Catalan. It is taught in the public schools and is the language of the greatest minds in this region.
As a spoken language, the sound of it hits my ear like a melange of Spanish, Portuguese and French. Of course, if I said that to a Catalan they'd smack me.
After all of these sidebars, I return to our table in the plaza at the Tantarantana Bar where our glasses are empty and our tapas plates have been cleared.
Will we now go in search of dinner? Or dessert? Or an adventure on a narrow winding street......?
Marlow and Wes in Barcelona, 18 September 2012
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