Opera. Three wastes in the form of opera

Could we find traces of materials to reconstruct an opera, or something similar, in the street debris?

Tres desechos en forma de ópera (for baritone, soprano, clarinet, violin and double bass) is the first production of the Compañía laperaÓpera, which was presented with this world premiere at the Teatro Guindalera in Madrid, as part of its Off Guindalera 2012 program. The company, created by the author himself, Jorge Fernández Guerra, was born from the need to reflect on the current situation of opera, a genre that has marked the history of Western music.

Tickets: 6 euros

              *20% discount for students and employees of the University of Navarra.

SYNOPSIS

Three musicians and two singers take to the streets to make a few coins with their show, and this is none other than the old but always renewed opera. The argument? to make the audience have a good time, from which they expect a modest reward in small change, like so many other street artists.

To do so (always singing), they discuss the problems of the institution of the couple, symbol of another very familiar couple in the twentieth century, cinema and opera, even contemporary. When they run out of certainties, the game begins: a statue serves them as a talking head to ask about the doubts that haunt them. And the head, like so many, since the famous one in Don Quixote, will tell them what they already know or what they can discover for themselves: that there are no answers.

For baritone, soprano, violin, double bass and clarinet.

PERFORMERS

Ruth González, soprano

Enrique Sánchez-Ramos, baritone

Mónica Campillo, clarinet

Gala Pérez Iñesta, violin

Miguel Rodrigáñez, double bass

TECHNICAL DATA SHEET

Music and texts: Jorge Fernández Guerra

Stage direction: Vanessa Montfort

Scenography: Florentino Díaz

Assistant to the Director: Khrish Otero

Production: laperaÓpera Company

JORGE FERNÁNDEZ GUERRA

Jorge Fernández Guerra is one of the most outstanding Spanish composers of his generation. In addition to his work as a composer, which has earned him the 2007 National Music Prize from the Ministry of Culture, he has stood out as a music manager and as an essayist on musical themes, with important responsibilities in the press and in prominent institutions of musical life.

As a composer, his work is framed within the scope of the problems of aesthetic paradigm change that took shape from the eighties onwards. Later, during his long residence in Paris in the 1990s, he broadened his vision of the transformations that creative music needed to undertake at the turn of the century, including the lucid revision of the avant-garde heritage and a new strategy of social validation of musical composition of European origin.

VANESSA MONTFORT 

The daughter of a Madrilenian and a New Yorker, she has lived in Madrid since childhood. Novelist, playwright and journalist, she is the author of the theatrical texts: Quijote Show (Madrid, 2000), Paisaje Transportado (Madrid, 2003), Estábamos destinadas a ser ángeles(Madrid, 2006) year in which she won the XI Premio Ateneo Joven de Sevilla with her first novel El ingrediente secreto ( Algaida, 2006) obtaining the favor of critics and public. That same year she was invited twice by the Royal Court Theatre in London (International Residency for Emerging Playwrights 2007 and Spanish Voices 2008), where she took workshops with leading British playwrights, including Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Martin Crimp and Simon Stevens, among others. His time in London has left translated into English the titles Flashback (London, 2007), The Best Chance of Being Alex Quantz (London, 2008) and The Courtesy of the Blind (2008). With his novel Mitología de Nueva York he won the 2010 Ateneo de Sevilla Novel Prize.

In 2012 he premiered the radio version of La Cortesía de los ciegos on Radio Nacional de España as part of a project to return sound fiction to the airwaves. He participates in the project together with playwrights Alfredo Sanzol, José Sanchís Sinisterra and Juan Mayorga. In March 2012 he premiered his theatrical version of La Regenta, a co-production with Los Teatros del Canal in Madrid that is currently on tour. She currently devotes herself entirely to literature: she combines the writing of her new novel with her activity as a teacher, giving courses and workshops on dramaturgy and narrative both inside and outside Spain.