He Royal Theater He had a last-minute surprise in store for the opening of his season. This afternoon, before the curtain rises on a new production of Medea of Cherubini in the presence of the Kings, all eyes will be on the dome of the main room, where the sky of Madrid will be projected, an artistic intervention by Jaume Plensa that recovers and updates the pictorial tradition of classicism with four high-resolution projectors that create the optical illusion of an immense transparent dome. “As an opera fan, I know how hard it is to disconnect when we burst into the room dragging all the noise from the street,” the Catalan artist, also the author of the levitating doors that the Liceu in Barcelona debuted exactly one year ago, tells EL MUNDO. anus. “I thought of these changing clouds, getting darker and darker, like an experience in transit towards the necessary silence that must precede all operatic action.
The moving images of this “light painting”, which will cover the surface of the wooden tondo and surround the large central lamp for the 20 minutes before the start of each performance, were filmed with 4K cameras from the roof from the theater itself over the course of three days in June and were later edited into seven clips that will alternate throughout the season. «With the project Cielo “The Teatro Real will continue to reclaim its roots and give wings to the imagination,” he said at a press conference. Gregorio Marañón, president of the board of trustees of the Theater Foundation. “But he will do it through wings that take root and roots that fly, just as Juan Ramón Jiménez proposed in his famous aphorism.” It was in 2007 when the Madrid coliseum contacted Plensa for the first time, with the idea of creating a collection of contemporary art unaffordable to the looming crisis, but the collaboration has not become effective until now, thanks to the support of the patron and businessman Juan Antonio Pérez Simón and the Friends of the Teatro Real Foundation.
Plensa’s work will also serve as a metaphor for a season that aims to continue conquering the sky of poetry with great stars and fundamental titles of the repertoire. Starting with the Medea which will be conducted, from today until October 4, by maestro Ivor Bolton based on a critical edition by Heiko Cullmann with recitatives in French by Alan Curtis. The new production by Paco Azorín, co-produced by the Abu Dhabi Festival, proposes a stark reading of Euripides’ tragedy in which three top-level sopranos will star on stage (Maria Agresta, Saioa Hernández and Maria Pia Piscitelli) throughout 11 functions that will be dedicated to Maria Callas on the centenary of her birth. In three of them (those on September 22, 23 and 25) the workers of the Intermezzo Choir of the Teatro Real have announced partial strikes to denounce her “precarious” employment situation.
The infanticidal myth of Medea, one of the thematic axes of the programming, will be resumed in July with the semi-staged version of the Medea de Charpentir, on this occasion by the specialist William Christie and the musicians of Les Arts Florissants. Another myth, that of Ariosto’s errant and furious knight, will materialize in three suggestive proposals: a new assembly of the Orlando by Handel, a concert version of Orlando paladin of Haydn and The liberation of Ruggiero from the island of Alcina by the baroque composer Francesca Caccini that Blanca Li will adapt at the Teatros del Canal. Also in collaboration with the Naves del Español in Matadero, it will premiere at the end of October The Regentthird opera by composer Marisa Manchado based on a libretto by Amelia Valcárcel and edited by Bárbara Lluch.
The first stage version of the Tenorio by Tomás Marco (who signs the libretto and score, leaving the dramaturgy in the hands of the Señor Serrano Group) and the two popular titles with which the Teatro Real will make its particular August: Rigoletto by Verdi (in a montage by Miguel del Arco with Javier Camarena in the role of the Duke of Mantua) and a Madama Butterfly by Puccini dedicated to Victoria de los Ángeles on her centenary.