In contrast to many other opera houses, the Ópera de Tenerife didn't cease activity during this past difficult year. For 2021-22 it continues along the same lines: few titles, but making up a well-delineated season, with the added challenge that most of them are in-house productions. There are contemporary works receiving their Spanish premieres, classics of the operatic repertoire and a family-oriented introduction to the operatic world.
The season opens with Miquel Ortega's La casa de Bernarda Alba, which premiered in Brasov in Romania in 2007. Librettist Julio Ramos maintains great fidelity to the original text of Lorca's masterpiece: a very solid libretto with strongly delineated characters adds to Ortega's well-constructed score and intense music. The work has been performed on numerous occasions in different productions and has always received highly favourable reviews, such as Bachtrack's Juanjo Freijo's review of the premiere of the chamber orchestra version in Madrid's Teatro de la Zarzuela in 2018. Ortega himself conducts the Sinfónica de Tenerife; the cast is led by Nancy Fabiola Herrera (who also played Bernarda in that Madrid production) and Luis Cansino as Poncia; Carmen Acosta is Adela. The new production is directed by Silva Paoli, who made an impression last season with a thoughtful staging of Lucrezia Borgia.
The season's second title, in November, is Verdi's biopic of Attila the Hun. It is an early composition and the composer's best is yet to come, but it's a work full of great moments (by the way, the opera owes much to our next composer, Saverio Mercadante). In this production, Andrea de Rosa's cool, traditional staging is well matched to the story of Attila and Odabella and will make a fine evening's opera. Musical direction is under the baton of Christopher Franklin, an expert in the Italian lyric repertoire; the leading roles will be played by bass-baritone Marko Mimica and soprano María José Siri, who has already tackled the role.
The story of the love, deceit and death of Francesca da Rimini has spawned numerous artistic interpretations (not least by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov), perhaps the most important version of the story being in Dante's Divine Comedy. Saverio Mercadante's opera version was scheduled to open in 1831, but the premiere was cancelled and the score was never published. The work fell into oblivion until 2016, when it was recovered and premiered in Martina Franca under the direction of Fabio Luisi. The title is now beginning to find its place in the repertoire, and Ópera de Tenerife is putting on a concert version. It will undoubtedly be interesting to see a magnificent, new! example of bel canto in which there is no lack of expansive coloratura and solid orchestration. Francesca is sung by Beatriz de Sousa, her lover Paolo by Nozomi Kato; Alessandro Palumbo conducts.