Composer Luca Francesconi clarified the purpose of his piece to journalist Tom Service (The Guardian 19/06/2014) for the premiere of his opera Quartett in London in 2014: Don’t dare to come if you can't accept that you need to analyse what you do and who you are. This piece is violent, it’s sex, it’s blasphemy, it’s the absence of mercy. The only two characters in the opera are the definition of cynical, they have made a pact that they don’t have to...

For his version of La Bohème, created in 2009 for the English National  Opera and now shown at Liceu, Sir Jonathan Miller chose Paris in the thirties as its visual referent, the Paris that Cartier Bresson and Brassaï immortalised through photography. This is not the first time that the British director turns to well-known iconographic referents to visually frame an opera title. In 1982 he presented an inspired “mafia” Rigolettoset in Manhattan that became one...

The dramatic intensity at the heart of Romeo and Juliet’s theme is such that not only can it travel in the Western culture from Shakespeare to Bernstein being reborn in each generation, but it also survives, almost intact, the heavy bel canto rhetoric.  Build upon Felice Romani’s inflamed verses up to a cliché, which at no point come from the Shakespearian referent (we only wish they did), I Capuleti e i Montecchi is still an imperfect Bellini that, although...

Barcelona. Gran Teatre del Liceu. 12/04/2016. Verdi, Simon Boccanegra. Leo Nucci, baritone. Barbara Frittoli, soprano. Josep Bros, tenor. Vitalij Kowaljow, bass. Àngel Òdena, baritone. Damián del Castillo, baritone. Francisco Vas, tenor. Raquel Lucena, soprano. Symphonic Orchestra of Gran Teatre del Liceu. Choir of Gran Teatre del Liceu. Massimo Zanetti, conductor. José Luís Gómez, stage director. Susana Gómez, rerun of the staging....

Amongst the performers that took part at the Götterdämmerung premiere at the Liceu the great highlight was the immense, anthological and unforgettable Brünnhilde by Iréne Theorin. Voice, power, dramatic engagement and understanding of the character put the Swedish soprano in a place to be considered one of the best Brünnhilde in the world, if not the best. Her final scene will remain in the memory of all for many years to come. The other...

Bad singing and worse staging. Otello, Verdi’s masterpiece with a libretto by Arrigo Boito – another masterpiece – and based on Shakespeare’s masterpiece, sank clumsily in its return to Liceu’s stage, after 10 years of absence. It isn’t easy to ruin three masterpieces, but in this occasion it was achieved.   Locating the opera in a refugee camp, besides resulting awkwardly fashionable, alters seriously the relationship and the balance...