The Flamenco Bomb

Sign up for the waiting list now! Two years after his abdication, Keizer Karel lives in seclusion in the monastery of Yuste, in southern West Spanje. A few weeks before his death in 1558, he organizes a practice ceremony for his own funeral. Did he want to attend that poignant and solemn event himself so badly? Or was it mainly a general rehearsal to ensure that everything would go exactly according to his wishes? The once most powerful man in the world apparently wanted to keep the reins in his hands even after his death. The always resourceful French conductor Simon-Pierre Bestion was called the 'Asterix of early music' by the Dutch newspaper Trouw. In La Bomba Flamenca connects his own imagination with that of Keizer Karel, and lets himself be inspired by the Saint Bavo Cathedral, the church where the emperor was baptized in 1500, to create a kaleidoscopic ritual in which brilliant Flemish and Spanish polyphony is interwoven with traditional Arab-Andalusian chants. This is not a historical reconstruction. This imaginary requiem of the emperor born in Ghent sings of a turbulent era, at the intersection of the Middle Ages and the modern era, an era just as complex as our own.