BRUGES, Belgium (dpa) – The year may already be a month old, but the Belgian city of Bruges still looks more like a building site than the 2002 Cultural Capital of Europe.
The Bruges 2002 cultural programme is due to begin on February 20, but instead of music, the city’s new Concertgebouw concert hall is filled with the whine of electric drills. The orchestra pit remains a sea of unembellished concrete, cranes and diggers adorn facades hidden by scaffolding.The hall in the historic city centre will serve as a focus for all things musical this year, provided the building contractors stop the drilling on time. “We would normally allow five years for a project of this magnitude. We want to do it in two years and five months,” say the concert hall builders.The inauguration of the Concertgebouw will coincide with the official begin of Bruges’ year as European Cultural Capital and will represent “a milestone in the cultural life of the city,” says mayor Patrick Moenaert.When Bruges was awarded the title together with the Spanish city of Salamanca, he recalls, the bells of the city hall rang out and the main square saw extraordinary celebrations.Bruges is “the ideal environment for a morbid bonvivant,” the Flemish-language De Standard newspaper recently observed. While visitors to one museum can admire an old master depicting someone being skinned alive, 100 yards down the road they can sit down to an excellent meal. As one fresh lobster is devoured at table, just inches away his siblings tap their S.O.S on the aquarium glass.The Concertgebouw will lend Bruges architectural variety – its annual tally of 3.5 million tourists are more accustomed to admiring the well-preserved heritage of the city. “Bruges 2002, and especially what is to come, is bound to change our postcard image” says the director of the cultural programme, Hugo De Greef.The organizers would like to persuade culturally-oriented visitors to extend their stay while also appealing to a younger public. But Bruges 2002 is also aimed at the largely rural population of western Flanders.Research has shown that “more than half of all Flemish have never visited a museum or exhibition, that 70 per cent have never been to rock or jazz concert and that 93 per cent have never been to the opera,” says Moenaerts.That could all be about to change. The new concert hall alone is to put on nearly 70 performances, festivals and concert series this year, although cultural exchanges with “twin town” Salamanca have been kept to minimum.As organizer Geraldine Leus points out, the opera Antigone remains the only co-production between the Spanish city and Bruges, where celebrations start a month later than in Spain.Not that the Flemish have been reluctant to expand their horizons – the cultural programme includes numerous international acts and like similar projects in Dijon, Bilbao and Oporto, the Concertgebouw project overran its 25-million-euro (21.63-million-dollar) budget, if only by a relatively modest 16 million euros.
