Few festivals offer the public the authentic summer experience that is to immerse yourself in nature and enjoy gardens that, although aesthetically cared for, are in themselves pure biodiversity. Especially if a brief rain extracts all the aromas, as happened this weekend in Peralada when the audience left excited at the recital given by soprano Diana Damrau and Nicolas Testé –her baritonal husband of hers– in the church of El Carme. Or when, after seeing the album of danced poems by Aimar Pérez Galí in the viewpoint, people went to El Carme for another experiment: the maestro Leonardo García Alarcón combined Monteverdi and Piazzola with his Cappella Mediterranea.
This is what results from having organized a reduced edition of the festival while projecting the new open-air auditorium. By chaining one show after another, Peralada takes its guests through the gardens of the Castell, even occupying some space in the town, such as the cloister of Sant Domènec, where on Saturday the composer Hèctor Parra and the pianist Imma Santacreu, his wife, gave tells in a workshop-concert of that adventure that is to work together.
In a hot auditorium – the air conditioners would have altered the acoustics – they both pounced with four hands on an open grand piano with Parra rubbing thirty objects on the strings, from combs to pendentives, which generated almost electronic sounds. They offered some fragments of the cycle in which the Barcelonan composer living in Paris is inspired by the Miró Constel·lacions. And also other piano versions of his operas, such as the enormous Les bienveillantes by Jonathan Littel, with all the perversity that the history of Nazism implies explained from the point of view of an SS, as Parra pointed out before an astonished audience.
The experimental sound experience concluded with the fifth episode of Orgia, his new chamber opera based on the work of the same name by Pasolini that Peralada has launched to co-produce together with the Liceu (it will be seen in April) and the Arriaga de Bilbao (where it premiered a month ago), and whose editing and script has been assumed by Calixto Bieito. A search for the deep reality of the human being through a sadomasochistic relationship between a man who does not recognize himself as homosexual and his wife.
Surrounded by the sanguine paintings of Hellenistic torsos that Parra made during his residency at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, whose project was precisely the composition of Orgia, the public enjoyed the artist's explanations on how he first composes on the piano and then makes the orchestration. Which served to make some lose their fear of the idea of attending a rabidly contemporary opera.
“It is not a literal orchestration of what was written for piano but a recreation with timbre as well. I ask the instrumentalists for adjectives... metallic, stridency in the strings... because my music goes through the stridency and deformation of a sound that can be very harmonic at the base. And the singing is very lyrical, although in a real world today, with sounds almost linked to technology”. But it was in the explanation of how he chooses the objects that he rubs on the piano strings that raised laughter. "Going to the supermarket is very inspiring, and the hairbrushes work very well, but I have to buy them all because you can't go with the piano to the supermarket to try”.
After the intense encounter with Para and Santacreu, the audience plunged into the generous variety of arias and songs from the Amor y vida recital that brought together Diana Damrau and her husband with the great Helmut Deustch on piano. With his singing facility and his characteristic vibrato, Damrau shone especially in "Al dolce guidami" by Anna Bolena and his particular "Casta diva" by Norma, but also in the vaporous French register of Duparc or in the German of Richard Strauss, not to mention talk about musicals like My fair lady with which the party ended.
He, however, opened dramatically and convincingly in the King Solomon aria from Gounod's La Reine de Saba but held his own justly in Don Carlo or La Gioconda, finding his bass-baritone goblet in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.
Vivacious and extroverted, Damrau gave away a song by Turina as an encore, perhaps in memory of Victoria de los Ángeles, before offering to present a cookbook at the Perelada winery (with e). She is one of the seventy opera singers who have contributed her cooking recipes to The Opera Cooks, by Evelyn Rillé and Johannes Ifkovits. Apparently, the best singers in the world relax while cooking, from Carreras to Kaufmann or Flórez or Netrebko. And the Celler's chef made the Damrau meat strudel a reality.
The dance was put on this weekend by Aimar Pérez Galí from Barcelona with Alba, a piece in the creation phase that will premiere in February at the Mercat de les Flors and that wants to be a game about choreographic, musical and poetic writing. Five performers and a piano demonstrated that the sextinas or palindromes have their particular grammar in choreography. Galí is inspired by Brossa, Lucinda Childs, Mestres Quadreny or Georges Perec to play at approaching the writing of movement with the languages of other creative disciplines.
And the Argentine musical director Leonardo García Alarcón closed the Empordà weekend with an exciting pairing: Piazzola and Monteverdi. His group Cappella Mediterranea boldly and shamelessly surfed between 17th century Venice and 20th century Buenos Aires, combining modern and ancient instruments, going from a tango to an aria from L'Orfeo, from a milonga to “Pur ti miro”. from Poppea, from Horacio Ferrer's texts to Lamento de la nympha. A true will is power.
