Saint François D'Assise se estrena en Japón este mes, con tres funciones en Tokio los días 19, 23 y 26 de noviembre. Sylvain Cambreling dirigirá a la Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra y Vincent Le Texier, quien encarnó al santo en Madrid, retomará el rol protagonista.
http://yomikyo.or.jp/e/concert/2017/01/ ... no-572.php

Recordemos esta grandiosa ópera con un vídeo de la obra completa, en París en 2004 con José Van Dam y Christine Schäfer. Ojalá se vea esta ópera de nuevo en España.

Bloated, repetitive, self-righteous and dull, this commission by the San Francisco Opera [...] represents a miscalculation of astonishing dimensions.

It’s a portrait of Gold Rush California inhabited by pasteboard figures and disembodied political mouthpieces. It jettisons actual drama in favor of endless travelogue, time-wasting asides and disjointed narrative logic.

And for all its stated intent to present a warts-and-all evocation of life in the Sierra Nevada of the 1850s, the piece doesn’t even conjure up that milieu with much more distinctiveness than a highbrow Yosemite Sam cartoon. Say what you will about the historical absurdities of Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West,” with its laughable Italian miners and its singular heroine, but that work — to which Adams and Sellars offer an ill-judged poke in the eye — at least trades in verisimilitude for genuine emotion.

For all its narrative power, Girls of the Golden West suffers from two problems which I believe to be significant. The first is that the vast majority of the text is narration – and unlike, say, Il trovatore, which has been accused of the same thing, the majority of that is spoken by the narrator directly to the audience, not to the other characters. Act I, where we are being introduced to the scene and the characters involved, began to feel like a very long history lecture.

tiene una mala pinta de narices...