The Liceu welcomes a ‘Manon Lescaut’ transformed right into a migrant by Àlex Ollé | News of Catalonia | EUROtoday

The Gran Teatre del Liceu hosts the opera from this Tuesday till the first Manon LescautGiacomo Puccini’s first nice success, below the gaze and modern scenography of the stage director, Àlex Ollé. Premiered in 2019 in Frankfurt with the identical forged, led by soprano Asmik Grigorian, Ollé has transformed Manon Lescaut right into a younger migrant who seeks a greater future, finally ends up detained and eventually, exhausted, dies. Maestro Josep Pons will lead the Liceu orchestra for all six performances.

Premiered in 1893, Víctor García de Moral, normal creative director of the Liceu, identified on the day of the presentation that the character of Manon, who all the time evokes a libertine girl, is torn between pleasure and advantage and finally ends up being a commodity, a sufferer of the system. “Love is the common thread and a great metaphor that happiness is promised immediately,” he mentioned. Puccini insisted on making a brand new Manon, though Jules Messenet had already made an opera concerning the character shortly earlier than. “But he alleged that Massenet thought of Manon in minuet and that he felt her as an Italian, with a devastating passion,” the stage director revealed, evoking the composer’s nice success and dedication.

Ollé pressured that they determined to make Manon bounce from the 18th century to the current day as a result of the story works completely. The protagonist drawn by Abbé Prévost acts pushed by her want for luxurious and wealth, which leads her to betray her lover for a wealthy bourgeois after which repent, and the one imagined by Ollè is an undocumented migrant who flees from “war, mistreatment, and social degradation seduced by a Europe that seems like a paradise.” The two variations have in widespread the “fierce love,” mentioned Ollé, to have a greater future. “It is said that Manon is selfish but at no time have we wanted to judge her. The set design is in her favor,” says Alfons Flores, liable for the set design.

The inns and diocese halls turn out to be this Manon in a bus station, in a brothel, a jail and the ultimate vacancy. The phrase love is the widespread thread of the 4 scenes. “First, she appears blurry in the first scene; in the second, in a night club, because she is bought; in the third, because she is in prison for love; and in the fourth, because that is all she has left,” Alfons revealed. Ollé added that because the story was revealed it was censored and controversial and agitated: “It showed active sexuality and there was a social criticism of the time.”

The opera Manon Lescaut It is taken into account one of many Liceu’s most beloved titles and traditionally carried out by the most effective voices, from Renata Tebaldi to Montserrat Caballé. Grigorian takes over and returns to the Liceu after singing and displaying her dancing abilities in June in Rusalka and reunites with Ollè, with whom she already did Manon in Frankfurt and earlier than. Madame Butterfly in Rome. “I have rarely sung in traditional operas with period costumes and I am more used to contemporary operas. Àlex has built a deep story that is close to the public,” she defined, defending that studying to draw the general public. “If we want the audience to grow, we need them to come and understand what they are seeing.”

After demonstrating with Undine her abilities as a dancer and actress, Grigorian reveals empathy with Manon for making her personal selections and never doing what is predicted of her as a girl. “She is not a victim. She does things of her own free will and her story reaches the present day. Many women are criticized and operas are written about women like them. If you do nothing, no one criticizes you,” mentioned this soprano, daughter of singers – her father has carried out quite a few occasions on the Liceu – and who this 12 months will sing Carmen for the primary time, in Salzburg.