Year after year, the Grec Festival is great news for Barcelonans. The blistering evening heat is rendered more bearable by a programme featuring high-quality music and the performing arts, some of which reveal the latest trends. Furthermore, it shows a perfect balance between local and international artists, who come from countries with great music and theatre cultures. Many of them are worth recommending in this year’s edition. We will spotlight Cuculand Souvenir, a show created by Roberto Olivan to be a spectacular display, bold and highly entertaining, even if it allows our usual way of spending time and, indeed, enjoying technologically-induced entertainment to be shifted into a critical tone. The condemnation of a kind of childishness takes place in an almost circus-like fashion, mainly through dance, which in itself is a fascinating pirouette. The number of ways of capturing – and challenging – viewers’ attention is mind-boggling. Its creators did not skimp on resources to astonish the eyes, and, likewise, to spur a positive revision of one’s own critical consciousness.

It’s not just the enthusiasm radiating from the musicians in the Jove Orquestra Nacional de Catalunya (National Youth Orchestra of Catalonia, JONC). Last year at the Palau de la Música, with a score as intricate and vast as Gustav

Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, we bore witness to their qualities: outstanding technique and a genuine commitment to the music, admirably administered by Manuel Valdivieso. The scene is being repeated this year, with the same conductor and even composer, the star of this magical evening. This time it’s his Symphony No. 1, nicknamed “Titan” in reference to its original inspiration, the bildungsroman by Jean Paul. Beyond its programmatic nature and the possible biographical echoes which have been sought in it, Symphony No. 3 is a late romantic work – a romanticism whose seriousness is difficult to take seriously today. It unquestionably incorporates recognisable elements and extraordinarily emotional themes, but it also combines high and low registers, accentuating the theatrical, artificial nature of the creation. The symphony begins subtly, with the silent sound of the cosmos, and it unfolds in a wondrous din, fuelled by popular melodies and grandiloquent declamations. Along with this work, in the year we are celebrating the birth of Leonard Bernstein – one of the most brilliant and passionate interpreters of Mahler’s symphonies – his Divertimento for Orchestra is also on the programme. This composition brings together a plurality of registers in its different movements. In fact, references to cadence are replaced by the names of dances, as a fun compilation – like a suite – of several popular dances from the early decades of the 20th century, including the waltz, the samba, the mazurka and the turkey trot. In Bernstein’s spectacular orchestration – with the lucid activity of brass and percussion – these dances are reminiscent of the world of West Side Story. This is a concert where you can discover the talent of the forthcoming generations of musicians and today enjoy – as proven by the concerts in past seasons – vibrant versions of two great works from the symphonic repertoire.

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One of the first bits of information we find out on the museum’s website related to the exhibition Sex in Roman Times is the show’s explicitness, as it is targeted

– as the website says – “to an adult audience”. This warning is justified bearing mind the usual caution exercised in the majority of art shows, even when just nudes appear. In this exhibition, which can be visited at the MAC (Archaeology Museum of Catalonia) starting on the 21st of June, different objects remind us of Roman culture’s lack of inhibition after the Republic in the 4th century. Sexuality was celebrated by ritual objects because it was necessary for reproduction and the perpetuation of the generations, but it was also promoted as an attraction. Few ancient societies were as aware of the importance of the erotic urge as Roman society was, and few exploited it so intensively and pragmatically. The exhibition, which includes around 80 objects from museums on the Iberian Peninsula – most of them unearthed in local excavations – is divided into five sections: “Sex and marriage” is devoted to relations between men and women within the context of Hellenistic ethics; “Sex, seduction and beauty” focuses on the issue of physical attraction; “Sexual practices”, examines different sources that reveal intimate customs; the fourth section is an expansion of the previous one on the possibilities of relations outside a legitimately established couple, with people of the opposite or same sex; and finally, the last section recreates the gods’ intervention in sexuality to illustrate some of the most striking adventures with human forms. In addition to these pieces, the show is accompanied by fragments from the classical Latin authors, experts in amatory matters – with Ovid at the helm, but also the stoic Seneca, Plautus and Suetonius – which help contextualise the works and provide a better understanding of how Roman society dealt with desire and morality over the centuries.

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