Shades of Grey

Barcelona’s 1908 Concert Hall was built for a choral society by private subscription for the purposes of singing and chamber music. Located up narrow streets, it is difficult to grasp the exuberance of the exterior without a cherry picker camera platform! These few shots hopefully convey a flavour though.

The building auditorium is effectively over the foyers as site space was rather tight. It is built in the Catalan Modernisme style that Gaudi developed and made his own.

We visited on an organised tour and interior photos were strictly forbidden. However there are two auditorium shots with the Wikipedia article which I show here under creative commons (attribution is in the title)

The auditorium is very light with large stained glass windows. Every surface is richly decorated and the statues either side of the proscenium dominate. There are twelve statues on the stage rear wall and this photo doesn’t do them justice. This quicktime panorama view does though.

The most unusual aspect of the room though is the ceiling.

This huge teardrop stained glass decorative fitting is truly stunning. You don’t realise how big it is until you take the virtual tour and see the office light well above. (watch the 8th video called office).

An unxpected treat on the guided tour was the organ playing Toccata in D Minor (presumably via MIDI, they wouldn’t emply an Organist to do that several times a day). The guide explained that the only way to sample the acoustic other than coming to an actual concert was to hear some real music- and very good it sounded too.

The Palau isn’t just for classical music, they say it works for anything except Opera, where the Liceu is much more suited to it. Indeed, we had missed the Swingle Singers a couple of weeks earlier. (Well, maybe that wasn’t such a loss…)