Palau de la Musica Catalana

When we were in Barcelona this past fall, one of the famous sights that we visited by accident was the Palau de la Musica Catalana (i.e. "Catalan Music Palace").  We'd read about it, but I guess it didn't really hit home until we saw the place.  It's right in the center of Barcelona, and is a very easy must-see.  We were just walking down the street, and there it was.  Sadly, because the streets are so narrow, it's hard to take a decent exterior shot of the building.  Here's one I stole from some website: 

I'm sorry I can't come up with a better exterior shot.  This shows the overall facade, but does not capture the magic at all.  Most pix I found on the net are all distorted wide-angle shots that don't capture the feel of the building or they are close-ups that show amazing detail but not perspective (you can see hundreds by googling "palau de musica image").  

The Palau de Musica is a concert hall.  Nearly every surface, inside and out, is covered with a riot of tile mosaics and stained glass.    When we were there, there was some performance every night.  I think they stay busy.  It is possible to pay to take a tour of the building, but we thought it best to simply go to a show.  We enjoyed it so much that we went to two shows.  One was call "Flamenco y Opera," which was a nice attempt to draw some parallels between similar shared passion of flamenco music and opera.  There were a few pieces of opera, and a few pieces of flamenco.  The performance itself was not stunning, but sitting in the building was fantastic.  The second show was a classical guitarist, Manuel Gonzalez.  Same story:  nice performance--not great, but the real star was the building.  We managed to smuggle in a small camera to take a few pix before and after the show.  I also turned off the flash for some live shots of the flamenco/opera show.   Click on each image to see full-sized:

This shot is from a flamenco segment of the Flamenco y Opera show.  This show was nearly sold-out.  The only seats available were actually hanging above the stage from behind.  The sound was not great from this location, but the perspective was really a lot of fun. 

Lisa was all excited that she smuggled a fancy outfit into her limited luggage.  Here is photographic proof.  As I look at the picture, I wonder why is it so hard for a person to align the camera straight up and down when a stranger asks you to take their picture?  Isn't it kind of obvious that the mosaic pillar is a lot more than slight askew?  Argh!  By the way, there are dozens of similar pillars throughout the Palau de Musica, each one with a different mosaic pattern. 

This is a detail of the astoundingly intricate ceiling.

This work of stained-glass is the centerpiece of the ceiling.  Amazing!

This show was from the second show we attended before the performance began.  The most interesting memory for me is that this picture shows our seats from the first night.  We were in the first row of the backstage balcony just to the left of the giant bust that hangs from the double pillar (nobody is seated there in this picture, but those are seats).