Orgia: Parra and Bieito Recreate Pasolini

Sir David McVicar’s 2001 production of Rigoletto for the Royal Opera may just have been displaced by a new version by Oliver Mears, but his The Magic Flute of 2003 is still going strong. Mozart’s final opera, which premiered on 30 September 1791 just a few months before the composer’s death, takes the form of a Singspiel that combines singing with spoken dialogue. In it, the Queen of the Night persuades Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina from captivity...

Based on Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto was a triumph when it premiered at La Fenice in Venice in 1851, and has remained one of the composer’s most frequently performed operas ever since. Its popularity is thoroughly deserved but might still be deemed interesting, given that it is a contender for the cruellest opera in the mainstream repertoire. While many works see the innocent suffer and die, there is usually a sense in...

Peralada’s Festival, one of the most important summer festivals in the Costa Brava (Catalonia), has premiered a new production for Handel’s Orlando, a risky bet for a title outside the mainstream operatic repertoire. This was a winning bet both for the musical quality of the interpretation as well as for the theatrical interest of the new production. The young Sevillian stage director Rafael R. Villalobos was charged with this project. He brought together on stage the...

Liceu continues with safe bets for guaranteed box office sold outs. Last month we had La Bohème and now for the closing of the season arrives Lucia di Lammermoor. The great title by Donizetti was presented with a premium cast: Mexican tenor Javier Camarena as Edgardo and North American soprano Nadine Sierra as Lucia for her debut at the theatre. The production, from 2015, came from the Bayerische Staatsoper, signed by Polish actress and theatre director Barbara Wysocka. The...

La Bohème, the title that never fails, the joy of the box office, has come back to Liceu. For over a hundred years La Bohème has continued to work perfectly around the world. Firstly, this is due to the underlying moral and ethical codes continuing to be largely valid, with little variations. And because the late Romantic and bourgeois concept of love (and sex) and of couple relationships on which it is based continue to be largely shared in the Western...

Although initially planned for the 23rd December, but later postponed due to the pandemic, we were able to finally witness – spread in two performance on the 6th and 8th May – at Liceu the show Radvanovsky: The Three Queens, which until now had only been seen at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. The Three Queens consists of the overtures and final scenes from Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux, the so called ‘Tudor Trilogy’ by Gaetano Donizetti. The...