The adventure of combining classical music with an immersive 3D experience is becoming something very serious within the Fundació La Caixa. Three years ago, the entity began this new way of disseminating and bringing classical music closer to all audiences with the multi-award-winning Symphony, an innovative immersive virtual reality project to which the conductor Gustavo Dudamel joined, under whose baton the viewer could feel while exposing himself to an astral journey of lights and music.
And if those 12 minutes that the experience lasted did not taste like much, as many users valued -so far 300,000 people have seen it in 21 Spanish cities, and 69% left wanting to go to a classical concert-, the current collaboration with the Liceu, which can be visited at CaixaForum as of March 3, Barcelona invites you to put on your virtual reality glasses again (you can see them in 2D on the new CaixaForum platform) for 16 minutes, which lasts for Ravel’s Bolero.
The Liceu Symphony Orchestra directed by its owner, Josep Pons, is exposed to the 360º cameras of the filmmaker and musician Ígor Cortadellas, whom La Caixa is counting on for these cutting-edge projects and who in turn puts constantly evolving technology into practice. “In fact we use a camera that is a prototype, the best that exists to shoot in 360º with the highest quality. Only this manufacturer from London, Visualize, has found a way to reduce to two optics what used to be a Frankenstein with several of them,” says Cortadellas. But these two shots have to be stitched together at some point where there should be no action, and instead we expose them precisely to an orchestra with many musicians and movement. We are forcing the technology to the maximum while the filming is very rudimentary”.
“We are at the zenith of technology and at the same time in the prehistory of that system: it is Méliès”, laughs Pons. “You had to see in real time if each take was sewable, which they could only do in London. They considered it good there to continue filming here”. The 3D technique is also applied to sound: thus, when the plane changes, the acoustic location varies, the reverberation, the intensity of an instrument that is suddenly closer. And by turning the chair, the viewer sees the sound in each earphone altered.
More than 150 people, including musicians and technical staff, focus on explaining what an orchestra is, the colors that distinguish the instrument, what each musician is after. And delving into one work in particular: that innovative Ravel, popular for its circular structure and its unmistakable crescendo. This 1928 classic also allows you to present the instruments as they appear. Was there a risk of turning it into an educational documentary?
“Precisely education is being transformed. It is not that we have to separate the educational from the experiential, but to educate in a different way, through emotions, which is what consolidates knowledge”, affirms Elisa Durán, deputy general director of Fundació La Caixa.
The team moves away from what would be a Socratic class and invites the musicians to explain the experiential, deep, poetic side. They talk about homogeneity –“we are many for one voice”–, the differences in color of the winds –“air, life”–, percussion –“empathy, power”–. It is what appears in the previous video with a band of starlings taking flight in unison. Cortadellas kicked half of Catalonia until he found where they spent the night…
