Monica Bellucci will be the Callas at a Peralada festival that opens with the Bavarian Ballet

The Peralada Festival has finally unveiled the program for the 36th edition, with which it returns to normality.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 May 2022 Thursday 03:07
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Monica Bellucci will be the Callas at a Peralada festival that opens with the Bavarian Ballet

The Peralada Festival has finally unveiled the program for the 36th edition, with which it returns to normality. There will be 18 shows, although it will last a week less than normal, reducing its duration to just one month. It also maintains a maximum capacity of 1,500 people, a public cap that it plans to maintain from now on. In addition to its usual venues at the Auditori del Parc and the Iglesia del Carme, there is now the Nou Celler Peralada, which, recently inaugurated, is also open to the festival "as a space for artistic pairings". Rafael Aranda, from RCR Arquitectes, has designed the festival poster evoking the presence of the winery.

While the rest of the summer dates with music and the performing arts seek to expand capacity to recover lost income during the pandemic, Peralada wants to offer a more exquisite experience and increasingly focused on the field of opera and performing arts, and dedicating just two concerts to pop music.

The artistic director of the festival, Oriol Aguilà, has highlighted a "program with its own personality, especially for lovers of opera and dance" and has described it as "a midsummer night's dream experience". Also the president of the Fundació Castell de Peralada, Isabel Suqué, has been happy with the fact that this is a festival of voices and has recalled that it is a "dream of my parents come true". The budget amounts to 3.7 million euros.

A star of the Empordà summer will undoubtedly be Monica Bellucci, who will give voice to Maria Callas in a show directed by the author of the documentary Maria by Callas. In this case, Tom Volf will direct the Italian actress on a stage that reproduces the Parisian apartment in which the legendary soprano spent the last fifteen years of her life. The GIO Symphonia will put on the music directed by Francesc Prat.

The show in French, titled Maria Callas. Lettres et Mèmoires collects unpublished material from the letters and archives of the diva, whose Bellucci will also wear a dress that no one has ever worn since her death. And in her own words, it will review three stages of her life: her beginnings in the 1950s, her love story with Onassis in the sixties, and her years of nostalgia and loneliness in the seventies.

This will happen on July 15, the day before Joan Manuel Serrat opens his Catalan summer with El vici de cantar 1965-2022, the tour that began at the Beacon Theater in New York in April and with which he says goodbye to the public that It has followed him for more than half a century of career. With hers, Pink Martini's will be the festival's second and last pop performance.

Another great veteran of vocal performance invited to perform on the Peralada stage will be the tenor Josep Carreras, who has just reappeared this week on the Barcelona stage, in a benefit concert for the Fundació Montserrat Caballé. Accompanied by the soprano Maria Zadro, Carreras will be supported by the Orquestra del Liceu conducted by his nephew, maestro David Giménez Carreras.

One of the strong points of the Empordà festival, which had been announced months ago, was the long-awaited Mariinski Ballet of Saint Petersburg, an institution that in the current context of the invasion of Ukraine has been considered too representative of Russian power. After its cancellation, the contest has been looking for a weight company that could replace them. And it has finally found the solution for its two opening nights, on July 8 and 9. It is the Bayerische Staatsballett (Bavarian State Ballet) that will dance two different programs with a common link, the Rubies by George Balanchine with music by Stravinsky.

And it will not be the only thing with a Russian stamp that this Munich company, founded in 1990 as an independent department of the Bayerische Staatsoper, performs. The Bavarians will honor their versatility and will dance from the aforementioned most genuine neoclassical to the modern dance of the impressive Sharon Eyal, as well as a piece by David Dawson, another by Liam Scarlett and the ballet created by Alexei Ratmansky from Saint Petersburg on Pictures from an exhibition of Mussorgsky.

Two other shows will round off Peralada's dance proposal: Sergio Bernal, the outstanding performer of the Spanish National Ballet who launched himself into directing his own company, presents Rodin. The sculptor of emotions, with its own choreography and assistance from Ricardo Cué. The dancer will put himself in the shoes of characters from iconic works such as The Thinker or The Kiss.

And Carlos Acosta will return to the contest with his most personal work, of which he is the author in part and the performer in the whole. On Before is a tribute to his late mother in which she enters with duets and solos on a journey towards death. For this, it has choreographies by renowned creators such as Russell Maliphant, Will Tuckett or the Cuban Raul Reinoso.

As for opera, Peralada's great passion, Hadrian will be presented, the second foray into the genre by crooner and composer Rufus Wainwright, as announced last April. But there will be a new operatic production like every summer. At the suggestion of Xavier Sabata, the festival's star countertenor, The Fairy Queen by Purcell will be staged. Dani Espasa and his Vespres d'Arnadí will provide the music and Joan Anton Rechi will direct the stage. And the cast led by Sabata will be rounded off by soprano Ana Quintans or tenor Mark Milhofer, among others.

Speaking of voices, the Ensemle O Vos Omnes will be the festival's resident vocal ensemble. With him will feature The fairy queen and also Sfogava con le stelle, a production in which the composer Raquel García-Tomás is inspired by works of the baroque, Bach and Monteverdi. And she will close the night with the premiere of the revision of her recent Suite of Myself that the festival has commissioned from her.

The Choir and Orchestra of the Teatro Real will also do double duty at the Empordà festival, with the already announced opera Hadrian by Rufus Wainwright, starring Thomas Hampson, Ainhoa ​​Arteta and the promising young Xabier Anduaga, and with the concert version of Verdi's Nabucco . On this occasion, the exceptional Nicola Luisotti will direct musically, with George Pétean as Nabucco and Dmitry Belosselskiy, Anna Pirozzi, Silvia Tro Santafé or Maribel Ortega supporting him.

The Iglesia del Carme will receive four very exceptional female voices. Starting with the recital of the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, the new and highly desired Wagnerian voice whose presence the pandemic forced to postpone. Sonya Yoncheva will attend with Malcolm Martineau on piano. And the very authentic Ermonella Yaho will also be heard, as well as the Canadian Emily d'Angelo, the mezzo with the most powerful stage presence of the moment.

Finally, on August 4, Lucas Vidal, the composer from Madrid who has conquered the world with his soundtracks, especially after Fast and Furious 6, will disembark with an electronic music project. Three years ago, Forbes magazine included him among the hundred people most influential creatives in the world. He has won an Emmy and two Goyas, one for Palmera en la nieve by Fernando González Molina and the other for Nobody wants the night by Isabel Coixet. And he was appointed ambassador of the Spain brand abroad.


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