The challenge that Àngels Gonyalons has in hand in the new show she premieres at the Grec Festival is so complicated that, before starting, she has a request: "I hope the audience turns off their mobile phones and the watches that turn green and seem like aliens in the stalls. It's a great acting challenge and a very delicate mental gymnastics, and I'm training a lot so that nothing distracts me, but...", she says, and asks theaters to invent a method for confiscating mobile phones before entering. The director of the Teatre Romea, Josep Maria Pou, believes it is "a lost cause". The actress resists: "There is a certain connotation of 'I paid for the ticket and I do what I want', and no: you are going to a very important and delicate ceremony, and there is a code, you are not in your dining room with a bowl of popcorn".

The enthusiasm was as great as the vertigo before the challenge. Six months ago, when they had almost everything tied up, Sigfrid Quer and Joan Manel Coco explained to ARA the new adventure of the Cor Canta Foundation: Sea of ​​seasThe symphonic choral performance premieres on Sunday, March 15th at L'Auditori in Barcelona (12 pm) and will also be performed on March 18th in Valls and on April 17th in Girona Cathedral. The enthusiasm is understandable, both for its conceptual scope and the artistic talent involved: the premiere of three commissioned works by composers Feliu Gasull, Ferran Cruixent, and Anna Campmany; the participation of the Terrassa 48 Chamber Orchestra; soloists such as tenor Roger Padullés, baritone Germán de la Riva, and soprano Irene Mas; and Àngels Gonyalons as a reciter; the batons of Elisenda Carrasco, Jordi Lluch, and Eva Martínez; and the poetic material of authors such as Manuel Forcano, Joan Vinyoli, Jacint Verdaguer, and Joan Maragall. And, of course, the 120 singers of the Cor Canta choir. "It's the most ambitious project we've undertaken in eight years," Quer notes a few days before the premiere.

A little over thirty years have passed since the powerful, caustic and tense proposal that Ariel Garcia Valdès directed of The crown of thorns at the Romea Theatre on December 22, 1994. Many years for a work that, without being one of Josep Maria de Sagarra's best known, is undoubtedly one of his most profound and tragic, and which confirms the linguistic, poetic and dramatic quality of this dramatic poem written in 1930 and which now, in the TNC's standing audience.