Last night, the Peralada Festival had a good surprise prepared for the faithful audience of the opera. With his new production of The fairy queen , Purcell's title that adapts Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, stage director Anton Rechi invited, so to speak, the characters of the operas that over the years have been going up on stage in the Empordà contest.
And in a great celebration of the return to life and the awakening of summer, he mixed them with Oberon, Titania, Puck, Demetrio and the other compadres of the Shakespearean classic, reinterpreting their fantasy. All together they walked and sang again after the pandemic.
As in Sisa's song in which all popular culture parades as a celebration –Jaimito, Doña Urraca, Frankenstein or Barba-azul–, the sun ended up rising on the night of Peralada when the public saw La Traviata.
“What is Violetta doing here?” said a spectator, discovering a member of the O Vos Omnes choir dressed in the character's unmistakable outfit. "And this is Carmen!" They pointed to another in a striking red train dress. Furthermore, people would meet the Don Giovanni that Carlos Álvarez performed in this square, and with Mephistopheles and Salomé, who walked treasuring the head of John the Baptist. Or with Escamillo or Pagliacci's harlequin, who greeted them as they passed.
It was a retrospective look at titles by Mozart, Verdi, Bizet, or Strauss whose characters had already stepped on this stage and were waiting to reconnect with their summer audience.
But the party had only just begun. When the curtain rose, the forest of Oberon and Titania had been integrated with that of Castell de Peralada to offer this semi-opera in five acts composed in 1692 by the English musician. The composer rather created little masquerades between acts, in the manner of an Italian intermezzo.
And Rechi takes advantage of this atypical structure that combines musical numbers related to A Midsummer Night's Dream and others in which Purcell distances himself from the play to propose to the public that they daydream and not be surprised if Madama Butterfly sings the forty to Puck or sings the moving "O let me weep" crying for the loved one who will not return, which fits perfectly with Puccini's opera.
This and other unexpected crossings took place in endless layers, gazetteers and unexpected winks, which ended before the intermission with a war of cushions between Turandot, Pollione, Papagueno, Rigoletto, Valkyrie... and all the others.
It takes a lot of complicity to carry out such a misdeed and that laughter is guaranteed. Complicity of the festival with Rechi, and of Rechi with Xavier Sabata, the countertenor who has a blast giving life to all the characters in one, including the Queen of Hearts. Complicity with the rest of the cast, some funny Ana Quintans, Judith van Wanroij, Mark Milhofer, Thomas Walker or Nicolas Brooymans. Or with the choir O Vos Omnes, which is the one that lends itself to so much disguise outside of Purcell's title.
Dani Espasa and his baroque formation Vespres d'Arnadí participated with ease in this effect of the opera house within the theater, a resource that, indeed, Shakespeare also explored. Although here it included the appearance of various British queens who join the party to vindicate the opera in their kingdom and counteract the Italian competition.
They are Isabel I, Victoria and Isabel II, all of them in the shoes of Sabata, of whom it is difficult to say if he is a better actor than a singer or vice versa. His comical appearance, tripping and falling repeatedly, caused hilarity among the audience while moving with various baroque arias.
The structure of the play even made it possible to include a hilarious Eurovision scene, with the cast competing with different arias for the ten points from the participating countries. Peralada's operatic proposal ended with six minutes of applause, bravos and kicks of celebration. The occurrence had been a success that Televisión Española had been in charge of immortalizing. The recording will be broadcast this August.
