Organization

Festival Castell de Peralada

Singer

Countertenor

Anita Rachvelishvili

Orfeo

Soprano

Maite Alberola

Euridice

Auxiliadora Toledano

Amor

Conductor

Gordan Nikolić

Stage director

Carlus Padrissa

Orchestra

BandArt Orchester

Others

Cor de Cambra del Palau de la Música Catalana

Orquestra Bandart

Italian

Orfeo ed Euridice -  (Orpheus and Eurydice)

Peralada

Spain

Auditori Jardins del Castell

Since 1987, the Catalan city of Peralada has been delighting audiences with its unique performance venue, the historical ensemble Castell de Peralada, and an interesting program of music and dance. For the 25th anniversary, the Catalan theater company "La Fura dels Baus" staged Gluck's world-famous master opera with its own imaginative world of images.

"La Fura dels Baus" was founded in 1979 and since then has been celebrating major theatrical events on stages around the world with its imaginative, unconventional performances. "La Fura" became known worldwide in 1992 when she designed the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Barcelona. In the 90s, "La Fura dels Baus" turned to opera; Unforgotten is "La Damnation de Faust" at the Salzburg Festival in 1999. Numerous spectacular, award-winning productions followed, including Richard Wagner's "Ring des Nibelungen" in Valencia, which was voted the "Ring of the 21st Century" by critics.

Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) set the more than 2000-year-old story of the singer Orpheus, who wants to bring his beloved wife back from the realm of the dead and fails on the condition of denying love, to music in 1762 for the Vienna Opera. Gluck wanted to break away from the schematism of the baroque court opera and bring the dramatic development of a credibly portrayed person to the stage. So Orpheus is not a superhuman being, but a husband mourning the loss of his beloved, whose pain and lamentation are expressed in moving songs. Gluck broke away from traditional musical forms and gave the chorus an important role in the style of ancient tragedy.
"The ideal of a truly dramatic music in contrast to the flirting sensuality of the opera of the time had already dawned on Gluck's Feuergeist," remarked Eduard Hanslick in his seminal work "The Modern Opera" (1874).

Photos