Northern Opera / Recenzii

David Ward, Artistic Director of the Leeds Opera Festival, is nothing if not daring in his choice of operas – next year a Sherlock Holmes world premiere! This year his target is Latin opera, with the great Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla’sMaria de Buenos Aires being one of two challenging offerings. Director Carlos Pons Guerra admits that the plot is “absurd and impossible even for opera” and his account of its oddities leaves one in total agreement: after Maria’s death at the end of Act 1, among her adventures in Act 2 are getting mixed up with an underground circle of psychoanalysts and being chased (and ultimately impregnated) by a group of drunken puppets – you get the idea. Yet for most of the time the opera is serious. The answer is that the opera is allegorical, the script packed with references to the Mass and the Bible, often distorted, and musical instruments and forms – in the First Act Maria falls in love with an accordion! Guerra transforms the script by excising most of the literal parts (many of them originally acted and danced to instrumental accompaniment) and replacing them with a queer agenda. It would be saying too much to suggest that this is immediately comprehensible, but he cuts the totally baffling and instead uses six talented dancers to suggest an LGBTQ+ world and to build a tension around Maria. Lu Herbert’s designs are a bit special, too, huge would-be religious icons dominating the bare, wooden, split-level stage. The narrator is the mysterious figure of El Duende, here split in two, with both spoken and sung story-telling. Both Carlos Felipe Cerchiaro and Ricardo Panela are excellent, Cerchiaro tending to rich sung delivery, Panela given the more cynical and astringent lines, often spoken. Julia Martins Solomon is outstanding as Maria. For much of Act 1 she is confined to wordless vocals, but then comes the song, magnificently delivered, where she expresses who she is, Maria of Buenos Aires. Her acting, movement and singing are riveting from this point on. The 11-piece band under Natalia Luis-Bassa is similar to the augmented version of his own band that Piazzolla used in 1968. In the absence of a bandoneon Valerie Barr excels on accordion and Luis-Bassa is thoroughly idiomatic throughout, both in the tangos and other Argentinian dances and in the more elaborate fugues that Piazzolla set up: from accordion to guitar to flute… The music is compelling, the action often incomprehensible, but always involving, a main reason for this the predominantly Hispanic nature of the participants whose understanding of the poetry and music is transmitted to the audience.

This year’s exciting Leeds Opera Festival pulses with the dance rhythms of Latin America and celebrates performers and directors of Hispanic heritage. Astor Piazzolla’s tango-opera Maria de Buenos Aires premiered in the Argentinian capital in 1968. Horacio Ferrer’s libretto narrates the story of Maria, a poor local girl who is entranced by the spirit of the tango. The story is implausible, even for an opera. Maria becomes a sex worker but falls in love with an accordion (the instrument, not the player). She is murdered by thieves and brothel madams but returns to haunt the streets of Buenos Aires and is chased by a group of drunken puppets. Carlos Pons Guerra directs and choreographs this Leeds Opera Festival production. He points out that the composer and librettist did not set out to tell the story of a woman. Their aim, embodied in the character of Maria, was to lament the decay of tango as a form of music and dance. A surreal storyline is amply compensated by authentic vocalisations from Julia Martins Solomon as Maria with Carlos Felipe Cerchiaro and Ricardo Panela as men in her life. The visual spectacle of Carlos Pons Guerra’s staging is enhanced by six dancers from the Chapeltown based Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Venezuelan born Natalia Luis-Bassa conducts the Opera Festival Orchestra’s luminous and spirited account of Rodriguez’ colourful score. Both operas enthralled and entertained full houses in the black box theatre of Leeds Beckett University’s Arts School last week. Leeds Opera Festival continues with Cuban and Latin recitals at various venues until 10th September.

This year’s exciting Leeds Opera Festival pulses with the dance rhythms of Latin America and celebrates performers and directors of Hispanic heritage. The Festival’s mission to revive rare and wonderful operas is admirably realised in this UK premiere of Frida, composed 1991 by Robert Xavier Rodriguez and based on the life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Rodriguez’ accessible operatic writing is seamlessly interwoven with Mexican folk song, tangos, zarzuela, ragtime, vaudeville and 1930’s jazz. Gorgeous smoky voiced soprano Parvathi Subbiah as Frida and Jacobo Ochoa as Diego lead a strong ensemble. Rodriguez evokes the Mexican setting with a spicy orchestration including prominent parts for accordion, guitar, violin and trumpet. The stage pictures created by director Francesca Murray-Fuentes and set designer Lu Herbert are utterly compelling. Distinguished Cuban-American conductor and composer, Odaline de la Martinez, leads the Leeds Opera Festival Orchestra as though this music courses through her veins.

The Northern Opera Group can be relied on to come up with something enterprising at its annual Leeds Opera Festival, especially now that they have a venue at the Leeds School of Arts which offers enhanced theatrical facilities; and this year, with its focus on Latin American music, was no exception. Alongside the relatively familiar Maria de Buenos Aires by the tango-inspired composer Piazzolla, there was the UK première of Frida by the American-Mexican Robert Xavier Rodriguez. The piece is to be located somewhere on the spectrum opera-zarzuela-musical. It has a serious content, focussing on the volatile relationship of the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but employing musical idioms embracing jazz, folk and contemporary classical, somewhat in the manner of Kurt Weill. Let it be said at once, that Rodriguez’s haunting score was most impressive. There was nothing clichéd about the use of the various idioms; rather, combined with ingenious sound effects, expertly exploiting the timbre of the accordion and percussion, they ably underpinned the drama . Odaline de la Martinez was the knowing and precise conductor of the small band. Authenticity was lent to proceedings by the shifts in the text between English and Spanish but the libretto (book Hilary Blecher, lyrics and monologues Migdalia Cruz) did not achieve the same heights of invention as the music. The problem lay in ambitiously exploring too broad a range of themes – the lives and loves of Rivera and Kahlo; artistic creativity; sexuality; oppressive capitalism; political revolution – and, at the end, following a rather breathless scamper from one to another, the work could reveal little that was novel or profound. Nevertheless, all the performers tackled portrayal of their characters with conviction and, where appropriate, exuberance. They were helped by a production (director Francesca Murray-Fuentes) which used the space with imaginative movement, particularly by the Calaveras (masked skull-figures representing death), and in an astute décor (designer Lu Herbert) which was not overloaded with detail but communicated some key visual images, such as empty picture-frames. The soloists, notably Parvathi Subbiah as Frida and Jacobo Ochoa, as Diego, contributed to the success of the enterprise with their uninhibited, attractive singing. Another significant operatic novelty served up by this boldly adventurous group.

Counter tenor Keith Pun performs wondrous vocal gymnastics as Chai Ping who translates Chung Ling Soo’s pretend Chinese into English to fool the press and public alike.

The strange case of magician Chung Ling Soo’s fatal encounter with a bullet is told with verve is this revival of Raymond Yiu’s music theatre gem