El festival en operanews
If you take a ship to the steep, rough coast of A Coruña, perched in the northwestern tip of the Iberian peninsula, the first thing you see through the mist is a flickering light. It is the Tower of Hercules, the only Roman lighthouse still in use in the world, standing 190 feet high on the tip of the mushroom-shaped peninsula.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the majestic Torre de Hercules was the first sight of Spain for thousands of British, Dutch and Scandinavian pilgrims when they reached A Coruña to start one of the legendary routes to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the so-called “English Road.” The travelers were easy to spot, with their coarse brown gowns with hoods, dusty sandals and long walking sticks with a seashell — the symbol of Saint James the Great — tied to them.
There are still caminantes de Santiago to be seen in A Coruña, but today most visitors come for a different pilgrimage, looking for the explosive mixture of old and new, cosmopolitan and Celtic, traditional and avant-garde that is the city’s trademark.
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A Coruña has always been an international port of call, and its musical life looks both inward, to its Galician identity, and outward, to the world and its changes. The city now boasts a first-rate orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, under the musical direction of Victor Pablo Pérez. It presents innovative programs and has introduced the local public to many twentieth-century masterpieces, most notably works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, whose symphonies are among Pablo Pérez’s specialties.
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Coruñeses like to do everything their way, and their manner of celebrating Mozart’s 250th anniversary is unique: they have programmed none of the composer’s operas. The festival, which has for nearly a decade opened the eyes and ears of Spanish opera-lovers to new takes on the Salzburg genius, has decided that its job is done. The 2006 program is focused on settings of the myth of the libertine by Monteverdi (L’Incoronazione di Poppea), Rossini (Le Comte Ory), Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress) and the little-known Spanish composer Ramón Carnicer (a contemporary of Rossini).
The art of showing something exciting and different from what one had expected has always been A Coruña’s game. This windswept port has surprised and intrigued visitors one way or another for centuries. The old enchantment is still there, but now, for serious music-lovers, there is a new lighthouse guiding the way to A Coruña.
http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/issue/article.aspx?id=1639&issueID=70
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