Saioa Hernández has found in the character of Gioconda the role upon which she is building a significant part of her career. She was the most eagerly awaited singer in this new production of La Gioconda, which has just opened at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, and this marks the sixth different staging of Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera in which the Madrid-born soprano has taken part. That is no small achievement, given that the work, though not a rarity, is performed relatively...

Great expectations surrounded, for several reasons, the premiere of the new production of Tristan und Isolde at Gran Teatre del Liceu. Chief among them was the fact that Lise Davidsen, one of the most highly regarded Wagnerian sopranos of the present day, would be singing Isolde for the first time in her career, one of the most demanding female roles in the operatic repertoire in every respect. Another source of expectation was that a woman, Susanna Mälkki, would be taking the...

It is unusual for an operatic production to remain in the repertory for more than forty years, and rarer still for it to continue looking fresh and youthful. This Elisir d’amore, which will occupy the Liceu throughout the Christmas season, has a long and distinguished history. In 1983 Barcelona’s Grec Festival presented a staging of L’Elisir by Mario Gas in open-air performances; in the early 1990s it was revived at the Festival de Peralada; towards the end of that decade...

Philip Glass’s Akhnaten has at last reached the Gran Teatre del Liceu, in what was also its Spanish premiere. Composed in 1983 by the Baltimore-born composer, the opera centres on the figure of the pharaoh - husband of the celebrated and photogenic Nefertiti - who sought to establish monotheism in fourteenth-century BCE Egypt, only to fail in the face of fierce opposition from the priestly caste whose privileges his reforms threatened. Structured in three acts charting the...

The use of a narrative, discursive or argumentative strategy based upon making animals speak is almost as ancient as culture itself. From Aesop to Disney, passing through La Fontaine and Orwell, the device of granting human language to animals has been employed in various ways and for various purposes, yet almost always with an educational aim - education meant in its broadest sense. In one way or another, we are all children of Disney. How many childhood tears, crucial to our emotional...

Fairy tales and witches are often – sugar-coated in disguise – terrible narratives full of anguish, loneliness, and fear. Beneath the barely concealed veneer of culture, they pulse with our “dark sides”, our most disorderly desires, alien to any moral framework. This is why it is so educational and necessary to tell these stories to our children from an early age, so they can name and shape their fears to grow up healthy. We must give a name and face to our fears...