After a limited return in 2021, the Colon Theater opens its doors in 2022 with a lyrical repertoire full of classics and great productions. There they sign up “Nabucco”, by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Stefano Poda; “Tosca” by Giacomo Puccini; “The Seven Deadly Sins” by Kurt Weill; “Bluebeard’s Castle” by Béla Bartók; “The Pearl Fishers” by Georges Bizet, under the direction of Michal Znaniecki; “L’elisir d’amore” by Gaetano Donizetti, directed by Emilio Sagi and performed by Javier Camarena and Nadine Sierra; and “El cónsul” by Gian Carlo Menotti, under the direction of Rubén Szuchmacher.
And the opening of the 2022 season, on March 15 (there will be performances until the 27), is a revival of “La Boheme” that he already presented at the Buenos Aires Coliseum in 2018, under the stage direction of Stefano Trespidi and a cast of great performers headed by the soprano Veronica Cangemi.
Bohemians
the opera of Giacomo Puccini which premiered in 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin under the direction of a young Arturo Toscanini, was presented in 1905 in Buenos Aires by Puccini himself, who spent almost 50 days in Buenos Aires to accompany the local productions of several of his famous plays. Invited by the newspaper La Prensa and the Teatro de la Ópera, the Italian composer was wildly applauded at the premieres of “Manon Lescaut”, “Tosca”, “Madama Butterfly”, “Edgar” and of course “La Bohème”.
The opera, a loose adaptation of Henri Murger’s novel Scenes from Bohemian Life, is also seen as Puccini’s tribute to Giuseppe Verdi and his “The Traviata”, based in turn on “The Lady of the Camellias” by Alexandre Dumas”.
In fact, Violetta and Mimí, the female protagonists of both works, are two faces of the same character, infinitely reversed in pop culture: the musical “Rent”, by Jonathan Larson, set in New York in the early ’90s, where the ghost of HIV appears in contrast to the tuberculosis of the original; and the film “Moulin Rouge” by Baz Luhrmann, set in the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec, with the sensual Satine (Nicole Kidman), who goes from overflow to tragedy in the face of an incurable disease.
“I believe that the history of the bohemians, who continue to exist today reformed, perhaps a little in the culture but they continue to be, in addition to a story of love and pain, and their music, which is very enveloping, make it very accessible to any public,” he says. Veronica Cangemi who will sing again at the Colón this year with Michael Schade, the Canadian tenor with whom he will sing fragments of Schumann and Rossini, before leaving for Colombia and Vienna.
revival
“I think they are two completely different works La Boheme with La Traviata, but they say that its protagonists are the same in two different faces. One is introverted and very fragile, and the other is totally extroverted and fearless. I’ve already done Mimi in five performances in Tokyo, and also at the Dresden Opera Musetta several times. AND I feel identified with Mimi because she is a character who is the conjugation between love and pain, a reflection of the love that Puccini had for the women he praised in his latest works, giving them an incredible role. This is a role that I always waited for and I have the great joy of being able to tell about it here at the Colón”, celebrates Cangemi.
“La Boheme” counts more than 50 presentations and 280 performances at the Teatro Colón, which include the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1917); the Argentine soprano Virginia Tola and the direction of the famous Argentine composer Héctor Panizza (on 11 occasions); Raúl Soldi’s wardrobe (1966); and the interpretation of Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo in 1987 and in 2010, when the theater was reopened after restoration.
It is without a doubt one of the favorites of the local publicwith a monumental second act in the setting of the Parisian Quartier Latin, with its bars and cafes and the setting of the Sorbonne University as the epicenter of bohemian youth, to which belong the poet Rodolfo, the painter Marcello, the musician Schaunard and the philosopher Colline, the young artists who star in “La Bohème”, neighbors of Mimí, the seamstress in love with the poet who suffers from the deadly disease around which the second half of the work revolves.
“I like that contrast of acts between the second and the fourth especially. That second act with its large, spectacular scenery, faithful to the tradition of the lyric. And the energetic atmosphere with many people on stage, which I love and is my specialty”, endorses Stefano Trespidiwhich has more than 30 years of experience in Verona and other major theaters around the world.
Get it back
“There is an important puccinista public in Argentina, in all of Latin America, that he likes italian operas like La Traviata or Nabucco, blockbuster operas”, continues Cangemi. And just as the Teatro Colón sets up a post-pandemic reopening and wave of Omicrón with a blockbuster play with a great staging to recover its audience, other lyrical theaters in the world made bets in tune. Following cancellations as a result of Covid, the Paris Opera managed to stage “Don Giovanni”, Mozart’s masterpiece, with American bass baritone Christian van Horn in the title role.
And he continued with Puccini’s latest masterpiece, “Turandot”, with the Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel as musical director and popular prices to renew audiences, targeting young people under 28 years of age. “This public that we call the public of tomorrow is the true public, the public of today. It is very important to open spaces for them, that they feel identified with what they see, with what they hear, as part of their lives,” said Dudamel.
Meanwhile, La Scala Milanese opened its new season with a dystopian “Macbeth” directed by Davide Livermore and designed to be broadcast and adapted to streaming: a trend that left the adaptation of the theater in a pandemic. “It is an evolution of opera communication. We are facing a historic change, because we introduce new elements that generate another interaction between the set and the score”, endorsed Livermore.
Cancellation
And the Met Opera presented the 2022-23 season with the return of half a dozen of the company’s favorite big names, but without the Russian Anna Netrebko (whom he replaced with a Ukrainian soprano: Liudmyla Monastyrska), canceled due to his support for Vladimir Putin’s invasion. “Failing to meet the Met’s condition that she retract her public support for Vladimir Putin as he wages war against Ukraine, soprano Anna Netrebko has withdrawn from her forthcoming performances,” the Met statement read. in tune with the bass of the soprano of the Royal Opera House in London, who also crossed out the director of the prestigious Bolshoi Russian theater, Pavel Sorokin.
Meanwhile, Monastyrska, who will replace Netrebko in Puccini’s “Turandot” at the Met Opera next April, comes precisely from playing Mimí in “La Bohème”, which she repeats in the reopening of several lyrical theaters in the world. “The idea of returning with classic titles has to do with looking from the theater, and more specifically from the lyric, for a return to normal post-pandemic life. We have a new normality for now with essays with distance and masks, and in La Boheme We cut the number of extras in the second act by twenty-five percent, but the essence remains, and of course the quality. In that sense, Colón and his cast are wonderful, and generous, the finishing touch for the Argentine public, very faithful to the lyrics ”, closes Trespidi.
by RN
