The music of Bach and Schubert sounded this Tuesday in the hands of the Casals Quartet in that extraordinary space with walls of industrial aesthetics and 10-meter-high ceilings that Ricardo Bofill called The Cathedral. A place that the late Barcelona architect transformed into a conference room, exhibitions and eventual concerts when, in the seventies, he turned the cement factory in Sant Just Desvern into his very famous architecture workshop.
His son, Ricardo Bofill Jr., now wants to pick up his father’s legacy and together with his brother Pablo is determined to give an artistic life to the place beyond its own architecture and interior design. “Architecture cannot go alone, it makes more sense when it is related to music, art…”, he assured on the warmest afternoon of the year just before this unusual event began, which means having the Quartet Casals two spans of the public, playing for less than two hundred people and with a sea of ​​cushions arranged on the front line for the youngest to lie down to listen.
Fresh from Wigmore Hall, where the night before they had given one of their usual performances to remember, and having also barely survived a flight cancellation from London, the members of the Quartet Casals, undoubtedly the most important chamber ensemble that Catalonia has produced in recent decades, they addressed Bach’s The Art of the Fugue for the Bofill family and friends and, later on, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, the musical piece that in 1997 made them decide to form a quartet.
The architect Óscar Tusquets or the sculptor Jaume Plensa were among the audience, as was the mayor of Sant Just Desvern, Joan Basagañas, arranged around the long conference table made of wood and steel. Everyone fell prey to Schubert’s compulsive romantic outburst in this second movement of Death and the Maiden, which sounded especially disturbing in the harsh acoustics offered by the raw concrete walls in The Cathedral, slightly rusty, a memory of the building’s previous use. … but also in keeping with that compulsive rapture with which the great Viennese musician, born in 1979, used to compose.
“This Schubert is an emblematic and very charismatic quartet,” viola player Jonathan Brown warned the audience. The second movement is a variation on a theme that Schubert had composed as a lied seven years earlier, “and it is the reason why we Casals exist”, pointed out the American musician who, by the way, is giving a lecture this Thursday, June 8 at the Palau de la Música with the pianist Victor Braojos on the architectural structure of Beethoven.
“Yes, because there is a lot of talk in Beethoven’s music about form and structure, but how can the listener understand a musical architecture? And how does it work in an art that is ephemeral, in which a note is but immediately leaves to be?”, he commented to La Vanguardia at the end of the concert and among that curious vegetation that climbs the walls of the garden, where everyone was invited to have a snack and drink.
The entire young and radiant Bofill family, including babies and a girl with promising gymnastic skills who moves around the cushions doing the side wheel, have come to the meeting without fail. Jaume Plensa is still moved by the recent performance of the Casals in the Foyer del Liceu, as part of the tribute that La Pedrera paid to the sculptor based on his cultural references: poetry, music…
Ricardo Bofill, for his part, is a relaxed master of ceremonies but aware of the legacy that he and his brother receive from their father. “Joy and expansion, and keep organizing things: that was the message that Ricardo left us. We are delighted to have you and I assure you that we will have more meetings,” he pointed out in that same Cathedral that is overlooked by the windows of the family residences and who has seen all kinds of ceremonies… including that famous wedding of Ricardo Jr. himself with Chabeli Iglesias, in 1993, which made the covers of couché paper.
