Organization

Festival Castell de Peralada

Conductor

Dani Espasa

Stage director

Joan Anton Rechi

Set designer

Gabriel Insignares

Costume designer

Gabriala Salaberri

Lighting designer

Alberto Rodríguez

Sound designer

Roc Mateu

Stage direction assistant

Albert Estany

Costume Assistant

Nadia Balada

Singer

Thomas Walker

Tenor

Mark Milhofer

Ana Quintans

Soprano

Judith van Wanroij

Xavier Sabata

Countertenor

Nicolas Brooymans

Bass

Actor

Orchestra

Vespres d'Arnadí

Ensemble O Vos Omnes

The Fairy Queen -  (The Fairy-Queen)

Peralada

Spain

The Fairy Queen Purcell

Public

The Fairy-Queen

Approved

PERALADA, A MUSICAL MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

The Fairy Queen is a baroque semi-operatic work in five acts, composed in 1692 by English musician Henry Purcell. His boundless imagination produced in this opera musical numbers associated with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream throughout the work, only to flee from it at certain moments. In fact, it would be legitimate to say that the relationship with the play was just a pretext to give light and sense to his genius. It is precisely in this atypical structure that stage director Joan Anton Rechi saw an opportunity to invoke the feedback between audiences and artists at the Festival. With musical direction by Dani Espasa, one of the great exponents of Baroque music in Catalonia, and the Baroque group Arnadi’s Vespers supporting a cast of leading Baroque voices such as Xavier Sabata, Ana Quintans, Judith van Wanroij, Mark Milhofer, Thomas Walker and Nicolas Brooymans, with vocal group O Vos Omnes directed by Xavier Pestrana, Rechi offers us in this new production a chance to daydream with our feet on the ground. The opera is presented as a fairy tale, a dream, at once a homage to opera and to the theatre and conversely the possibility of dreaming away mid-summer nights in Peralada. Dreams in operatic form, into which we sink through the gardens. A dream space opened up by a landscape of desire and freedom. Authors and composers wander lost through the gardens half-way between dream and reality, seeking inspiration to bring back the great nights, characters from the most iconic operas seen at the Festival await their turn on stage… all in all a theatrical exercise with the marvellous music of Purcell as its background. And that is the effect of operatic theatre within the theatre, a device also explored by Shakespeare in his works, and that this opera is rich in.

English

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

Crew

Ensemble