Liceu Lyric Gala ★★★✩✩
Performers: Lisette Oropesa, soprano. Ermonela Jaho, soprano. Javier Camarena, tenor. Carlos Alvarez, baritone. Orchestra of the Grand Theater of the Lyceum. Address: Sesto Quatrini. Place and date: Gran Teatre del Liceu (2/V/2024)
Festive night with four singers loved and desired by a high school audience always eager for great voices. The orchestra abused the forte and covered the soloists on more than one occasion, for a showy result that featured four artists in whose performance there was a little of everything.
The always admired baritone from Malaga Carlos Álvarez offered his beautiful tone and clear delivery, although visibly and noticeably diminished in a projection that was the one that suffered the most from the orchestral volumes. Álvarez, elegant and theatrical, gave his best with the aria from Verdi's Falstaff, “Ehi! Taverniere! ", in a role that he has never sung here and would be his sixteenth role for a baritone who has been everything at the Liceu.
The Mexican Javier Camarena showed his renowned empathetic singing and a brave high register. He seems to have lost the insolent freshness of the upper register, now more worked, but not for that reason effective and with brilliant results as was a “Lunge da Lei… de' Miei Bollenti Spiriti” from Verdi's La Traviata that started one of the ovations of the night.
The Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, always in role, emotional and visceral, seduced with aplomb in “Io sono l’umille ancella” by Cileà's Adriana Lecouvreur, as well as in her scene from Madama Butterfly alongside Álvarez's Sharpless. She closed with a cathartic “Addio del passato”, in the vein of her renowned Violetta Valery, a Traviata of skin-deep sensitivity.
Finally, soprano Lisette Oropesa proved to be the fittest and freshest voice. With a crystalline technique, clear diction and radiant colorations, she was an electric Adina in her duet with Camarena, graceful in her romance of the zarzuela Monte Carmelo by Moreno Toronja and sparkling in her waltz from Juliette. She left the public wanting a desired return with a leading role, since she is in the best moment of her career.
The work of maestro Sesto Quatrini was adjusted to a correct accompaniment and a sinuous gesture, with a soulless Goyescas Intermezzo by Granados or a noisy Luisa Miller Overture by Verdi. He highlighted Puccini's music for the centenary anniversary of his death. The result was more anecdotal than anything else due to the originality of the Puccini pieces, fragments of the opera Le Villi (1884), by the way the first opera by Puccini that has never been staged at the Las Ramblas theater.
