While retail stores and outdoor events might slowly be opening during this summer’s coronavirus quarantine, music venues face a particular set of challenges when it comes to returning to business as usual. Fortunately for opera and plant fans alike, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu has decided to nip those issues in the bud and open their concert hall, not to people, but to thousands of verdant house plants.
As NPR reports, when the Spanish venue opened on Monday evening for a performance by UceLi Quartet, the opera house’s first concert since mid-March, its 2,292-seat capacity was filled with extremely handsome fauna, which the theater will donate to health care professionals working at the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona.
“After a strange, painful period, the creator, the Liceu’s artistic director and the curator Blanca de la Torre offer us a different perspective for our return to activity, a perspective that brings us closer to something as essential as our relationship with nature,” the theater said in a release. “The Liceu, one of the largest and most important opera halls in the world, thus welcomes and leads a highly symbolic act that defends the value of art, music and nature as a letter of introduction to our return to activity.
Human audience members can also watch conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia’s “Concierto Para El Bioceno,” during which the quartet performs Puccino’s Crisantemi, from home via the video below.
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