Gran Teatre del Liceu: Dudamel conducts Scheherazade

About the Event

Step into the enchanting world of classical music as Gustavo Dudamel, the renowned conductor, brings Rimsky‐Korsakov's Scheherazade to life at the prestigious Gran Teatre del Liceu.

One Thousand and One Nights, a legend that compiles medieval tales from the East collected in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age, is the perfect metaphor for storytelling as a form of resistance. With this same pulse, Rimsky‐Korsakov conceived Scheherazade, a symphonic poem in which music becomes a voice that, with cunning and light, defies darkness.
With Dudamel on the podium, the orchestra becomes a fabric of successive waves: the sensuality of the solo violin, the solemnity of the woodwinds, the orchestral relief that evokes imagined ports, storms that burst forth, and oases that open like mirages.
This reading becomes even more intense thanks to the film by Shirin Neshat, an artist who has turned exile, identity, and silence into aesthetic material. Her images do not illustrate the music, but rather engage in dialogue with it: faces emerging from the shadows, deserts breathing like blank pages, writings that traverse the skin, and a femininity that radiates both strength and vulnerability at once. Neshat constructs a visual universe in which Scheherazade is not a mythical figure, but a contemporary voice that reclaims the power of storytelling in a fragmented world.
In this encounter, a co‐production between the Gran Teatre del Liceu and the New York Philharmonic, music and image become two banks of the same river. Dudamel shapes the sonic discourse with an almost cinematic plasticity, while Neshat weaves a poetics in which body, gaze, and desert become metaphors for a struggle that still persists today.
Thus, Scheherazade resonates not as an orientalist exoticism, but as a meditation on the power of storytelling: that thread that keeps us united in times of uncertainty, that voice that will remain alive as long as someone listens. An invitation to remember that beauty—when spoken with truth—can still save us.