A Surreal Double Bill: Larmes de couteau and Full Moon in March at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

These aren’t good times for new productions, theatres’ pockets are empty and everyone makes do as they can. For the performances of Les contes d’Hoffmann, Liceu had to rescue from the storage the production directed by Laurent Pelly, accredited Offenbach specialist. This same production was shown in Barcelona in 2013 and in a way it was already a re-elaboration of the work Pelly himself had done ten years prior for the Lausanne opera house with the same team...

La Traviata managed to premiere at Liceu on the 5th December, but had to cancel performances during the following days due to the context of endless push and pull between the cultural Catalan institutions and the health authorities around maximum audience capacity numbers permitted at concert halls and theatres. La Traviata came back to the stage from the 14th and perhaps will, finally, manage to survive as the strong point of the theatre's festive period. This greatly...

Sis solos soles (Six solos alone) consists of six brief monodramas for a female singer accompanied by a single instrument, moving between drama, tragedy and macabre comedy. These take place in six different domestic spaces at six points of the life cycle. This was an innovative proposal that Liceu, in co-production with Òpera de Butxaca I Nova Creació, offered to six contemporary composers to showcase the diverse lines of current musical creation. The project was due to...

... With such assertiveness Don Giovanni addresses the final number of the first act. This certainly seems to be the spirit of the Don Giovanni currently being staged at Liceu. The world is crumbling around them, but Don Giovanni and Liceu are firmly staying put. To bring Don Giovanni to the stage “could almost be defined as an act of cultural resistance”, stated publically a few days ago Víctor García de Gomar, the artistic director of the theatre in Barcelona....

Normality comes back at Liceu – a kind of normality which we now know will never be a return to the past. This is being done in a brave, slow and difficult way, both for the staff and artists as well as for the audience. Juan Diego Flórez was due to offer a recital at Liceu last May and, after the pandemic forced it to be rescheduled, it was eventually divided into two sessions, on the 21st and 23rd October, in order to accommodate every person that had bought a ticket in...

"perpetual music", a project initiated by Artists must speak, make music, and perform: that is their language, that is their soul. Even if it is not reflected in politics, art and culture are part of our society, and as much a part of our life as eating, drinking or breathing. Artists cannot survive without performances and have thus fallen into a deep existential crisis due to the Coronavirus crisis, with its...