When Valentí Oviedo, General Manager of Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, asked subscribers what a digital opera offering could provide that might be missing from their experience in the theatre, the responses were varied. One said “I sit in the last row of the stalls and I cannot see how the orchestra play and I cannot see the conductor”. For another, it was “I want to read the surtitles in the original language, how the opera was written”. A third fondly recalled visits to the Liceu with his father, who would always bring a score to the performance and follow it by torchlight (something not permitted today).
When Covid-19 hit in 2020, just about every opera house on the planet scrambled to find the best way of engaging with video. Some exhumed their back catalogues, some played to cameras in empty houses, some created special projects for filming. For Oviedo, it was a case of “how do we do what we’re already doing, but better”.
The Liceu was almost totally destroyed by a fire in 1994 and the rebuilding project was so extensive that the theatre in La Rambla, which had been privately owned, was committed to the care of a new public foundation. When the building reopened in 1999, the company immediately set about improving its reach, becoming one of the first opera houses to broadcast its performances live into cinemas. So filming opera was nothing new to the Liceu, but when the pandemic arrived, they lacked a platform for web streaming. As an interim measure, they could rely on third parties like Operavision or Arte, but Oviedo set about considering what a new platform could provide.
Quickly, he decided that simply filling a website with their back catalogue would be the wrong option: this wouldn’t really add value, and besides, there were other houses with huge back catalogues who would be better placed to take this approach. Rather, Oviedo decided to view the problem through the eyes of a season subscriber, “to imagine that a subscriber could have at least the same experience that he has when he comes to our theatre”. The objective was twofold: firstly, to enhance the experience for existing and new subscribers, and secondly, to provide opera to people who are unable to come to the Liceu on a regular basis because they live too far away or can't afford the tickets. “We thought we could have a product which would not compete with the experience that someone has when they come to the theatre, but would be complementary.”
Soon, the wish list of features was sufficiently long that it became clear that the Liceu could only fulfil it by creating their own platform. To add to the technical elements, doing this would open up the possibility of building a community around the Liceu’s digital offering, providing contact with the artistic teams, most notably the director and conductor, with a “chat master” for the live broadcasts who can talk to a subscriber in the way that they might have chosen to talk to the person in the seat next door. It also became clear that the platform could be international in scope. From there, the concepts began to take shape.
Liceu+LIVE will open its (virtual) doors on 5th November with a performance of Il trovatore, that most Spanish-flavoured of Verdi operas, directed by Barcelona native Àlex Ollé and starring Saioa Hernández, one of the big stars of the Spanish singing scene, as Leonora and Juan Jesús Rodriguez as her nemesis Di Luna. The €60 subscription (€30 to current Liceu subscribers) will buy you access to the digital season’s five operas and (in future seasons) to the five in the previous year: that’s low cost enough that Oviedo considers that “the price is not a barrier to access to the opera”. You will be able to watch the live stream on the day of the performance, or the “Premium edition” on demand around 10 days later. Oviedo believes that this first set of five operas is particularly strong: as well as Il trovatore, there’s the Lotte de Beer production of Il trittico, with Giorgetta sung by Lise Davidsen, the hottest property on the international soprano circuit, and Suor Angelica sung by Ermonela Jaho (for whom this has become a signature role). Then there is Tosca with Maria Agresta, Macbeth with an all-star cast of Sondra Radvanovsky, Luca Salsi and Erwin Schrott, and Massenet’s Manon with Nadine Sierra and Javier Camarena. The strong Spanish flavour is a matter of no little pride: “we are very proud of trying to push the new Spanish star system and try to give opportunities to the singers as we did many years ago with Caballé or Carreras.”