The tenor Freddie de Tommaso will once again put his thunderous voice to the test this summer in the Carme de Peralada church, where a few weeks ago he made his Catalan debut performing in the first Easter edition of the Empordà festival. The Italian-British tenor, one of the stars of the next season at the Liceu, will open a private edition of the summer contest in Peralada on July 28, the 37th already (tickets are already on sale and at a discount for subscribers from the next week).
This appointment with music and the performing arts goes through moments of change that prevent it from making use of its auditorium. Handicap that it supplies with imagination and a mini edition, until August 5, which extends today and tomorrow in Barcelona and which is scheduled to reappear in autumn. All this with a budget of 1.7 million euros.
Thus, lyrical recitals will abound with figures that are present in the great auditoriums of the world. The German soprano Diana Damrau arrives this time with her partner, the bass-baritone Nicolas Testé, singing opera, operetta, song and musical under the shelter of Helmut Deutsch's piano. And Núria Rial, universal Catalan, will pay tribute to Victoria de los Ángeles singing from “the soul”, with the expressive purity that characterizes her.
In this edition, the prescribing festival of voices will present a promising tenor, the Chilean raised in the United States, Jonathan Tetelman, who will go through Liszt and Verdi to end up with Gardel or Sorozábal. And another tenor, Xabier Anduaga, will close the festival in a duet with the soprano Serena Sáenz, who also made her debut here at Easter as Giuditta.
The process of building a new auditorium to replace the current one, with a luxurious seating area and walls that guarantee listening from any location, has made it necessary to reduce the proposals, but the festival continues to bet on dance – with the debut of Israel Galván with that Solo that was already seen in Temporada Alta–, for early music –with Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations addressing the music of three kings, Louis XIII, XIV and XV– or for chamber opera, with that love triangle which is the comic opera The telephone, or l'amour à trois, by Gian Carlo Menotti, which will be seen with musical direction by Iván Martín and stage direction by Maria Goiricelaya.
The GIO Symphonia directed by Francesc Prat will be in charge of adding an after to this comic operetta. They will play the Beatles and David Bowie in an orchestral key. Although for singular proposals that of the Argentine maestro Leonardo García Alarcón, who with the Capella Mediterrània travels from the Venice of Monteverdi to the Buenos Aires of Piazzola..., and that of Hèctor Parra –who is preparing the co-production of the Liceu and Perelada de Orgia– and Imma Santacreus with a concert workshop.
The Barcelona-based composer living in Paris will also exhibit the drawings he made in Rome when he won the Villa Medici scholarship last summer and, apart from building this exhibition of torsos entitled La lingua del corpo, he composed the opera Orgia based on the theatrical text by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
"We share the future transformation of the festival, which is approaching its fifth decade. This new house will reaffirm us as the summer capital of our country", said its artistic director, Oriol Aguilà, yesterday. Another change: the event is renamed Festival Perelada (with an e), in order to unify its number with the brand of the winery and the wines, although both the Castell de Peralada Foundation and the Peralada Campus maintain the locality's number.
In addition, it is one hundred years since the acquisition of the castle by the industrialist Miquel Mateu, father of the festival's founder, for which the business group wanted to celebrate it this week in Barcelona, with an art exhibition and an immersive wine tasting in the Ideal (Centre d'Arts Digitals), where the festival schedules a musical and dance show today and tomorrow.
L'Obsequi is a triptych with the premiere of a commission from Marc Timón, also from Empordà, who with an ensemble of strings and two sopranos, piano and synthesizer, wants to alter the relationship between electronics and classical music and achieve "that techno is the that marks the piece”. There will also be Camelia, by Iratxe Ansa, commissioned for the first time in 2021, and 60 SEC, by the Afro-British choreographer Botis Seva, winner of the 3rd edition of the Carmen Mateu Young Artist European Award. Isabel Suqué, president of the festival, presented him with the award yesterday, recalling that he is a creator "who connects with today's society and languages."
