A Bunch Of Houseplants Just Got The Performance Of Their Lives At Barcelona’s Opera House
Words can express how obsessed I am with this video of an entire concert hall filled with plants receiving a live performance from a four-person orchestra… or a quartet, which it’s apparently called, idk.
Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona re-opened on June 22 for the first time since Spain went into lockdown mode (bloody coronavirus). However the theatre’s 2,292 seats were not filled with people — because social distancing — but instead with an entire hall full of lush green house plants.
I fully understand that this on its own is slightly weird, but not that exciting, but my GOD — wait until you see the video.
The eight-minute performance of the UceLi Quartet playing Giacomo Puccini’s I Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums) was live-streamed online, and apparently a real crowd-pleaser.
The video starts with a reminder to turn off phones and refrain from taking photos — and I literally cannot. I am already way more into this than a grown woman should be.
As the musos walk out to the soft rustling of leaves, we get a wide shot of the theatre, which 100 percent looks like a scene out of Jumanji — but like, before there’s been too much decay but after nature has taken over. It’s actually quite beautiful.
During the performance — and this is absolutely the best part — we get extreme close-ups of the plants. You know, the way the cameras would normally pan for human reactions to what they were seeing.
I have LOST it at this point, for some reason especially at the potted lavender, which really doesn’t seem to fit amongst its leafy brethren.
Officially, the whole thing was meant to help people connect to nature. Speaking before the performance, the Spanish conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia, who put it all together, spoke about the inspiration of nature during lockdown.
“I heard many more birds singing. And the plants in my garden and outside growing faster. Without a doubt, I thought that maybe I could now relate in a much [more] intimate way with people and nature.”
Gran Teatre del Liceu backed this up with a statement explaining they wanted to “offer a different perspective for our return to activity, a perspective that brings us closer to something as essential as our relationship with nature”.
Anyway, you can have a gander at the whole thing below:
To be honest, those plants are so lush I was wondering how to get my new-plant mum hands on them, but apparently they were all donated to local health care professionals to thank them for their hard work during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is nice
However, my biggest questions still remains — were the plants measured before and after to see if classical music does, in fact, make them grow? Wasted experiment otherwise, imo.
I don’t know, maybe I’ve just spent to much time inside, but I will never recover from this.
(All Images: Youtube / LiceuOperaBarcelona)
