The 10th edition of the BOV Opera Festival will kick off on March 18 at the Manoel Theatre with works by Vaughan Williams and Mozart's The Magic Flute, on the programme.
Bank of Valletta CEO Tonio Depasquale today presented the bank’s official sponsorship for the 2009 Opera Festival to Manoel Theatre Chairman, Peter Fenech.
“As a leading patron of local arts and culture Bank of Valletta has throughout these past ten years built a strong relationship with Teatru Manoel. This has enabled us to offer, year after year, a spectacle of opera in one the oldest theatres in Europe. The BOV Opera Festival has established itself as one of the most anticipated event of Malta’s cultural calendar”, Mr Depasquale said.
“The BOV Opera Festival is celebrating an important milestone this year, 10 years of unbroken tradition of opera with a programme that appeals to all ages. Throughout these years the event has become an integral part of the cultural and operatic calendar of Teatru Manoel”, said Dr Fenech.
The festival this year will feature French Opera Company ARCAL which will be bringing their acclaimed stage-production of Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea. There will be a special performance of Milhaud’s ‘Le Pauvre Matelot’.
Mozart’s highly celebrated opera, ‘The Magic Flute’, with direction by Miriam Gauci and an entirely Maltese cast. The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra will be conducted by Mro Michael Laus.
Composed in 1927, ‘Riders to the Sea’ is a one-act opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on the text of Irish playwright John Millington Synge. Like all of Synge’s plays, this one-act tragedy is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland. It tells the story of a woman who has lost her husband, father-in-law, and five sons to the sea. Inspired by his visits to the Aran Islands, ‘Riders to the Sea’ distills into a compressed stage action Synge’s sensitivity towards the horror of death that he felt reach into the lives of the people he met on the island. Vaughan Williams set Synge’s text essentially intact, to produce a work which is generally regarded as his most successful opera.
To tell the story of the old woman, Vaughan Williams wrote some of his most remarkable music: grim, spare, often dissonant, and almost entirely unrelieved in its forbidding quality.
‘Riders to the Sea’ will be complimented by a performance of the Vaughan Williams’ renowned ‘Songs of Travel’ for baritone voice. Composed between 1901 and 1904, the nine songs were drawn from a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson poems of the same name and they represent Vaughan William’s first major venture into songwriting. ARCAL will be staging both works by Vaughan Williams in the Manoel Theatre on the 18th and 19th of March.
The 20th to the 23rd of March will see the performance of ‘Le Pauvre Matelot’ (The Poor Sailor), a three act opera composed by Darius Milhaud, to the libretto of Jean Cocteau. Be it misadventure or tragedy, the story of ‘Le Pauvre Matelot’ has a bitter twist. It recounts how a sailor returning home in disguise, is being killed by his wife because the make-belief story he has cooked up is so credible that the loving wife needs to get rid of the stranger to rescue her husband from debt. ARCAL will rekindle the true spirit of this opera, whose action evolves mainly in a bar, by performing it at the Manoel Theatre’s Café.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ brings the Opera Festival to a close, with performances on the 24th and 25th March.
Since its premiere, ‘The Magic Flute’ has always been one of the most beloved works in the operatic repertoire. Composed in 1791 and premiered that September, the huge success of this opera lifted the composer’s spirit in the last months of his life, before his untimely death in December 1791.
Composed to a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, ‘The Magic Flute’ was the culmination of a period of increasing involvement by Mozart with Schikaneder's theatrical troupe. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue in the native German language. Essentially a fairy-tale opera, ‘The Magic Flute’ is often regarded as an allegory advocating the philosophy of Enlightenment.
The Queen of the Night represents a dangerous form of obscurity, whereas her antagonist Sarastro symbolizes the reasonable sovereign who rules with paternalistic wisdom and enlightened insight. With both Schikaneder and Mozart being Masons and lodge brothers, ‘The Magic Flute’ is also noted for its prominent Masonic elements. The scene of the opera is set in Egypt where freemansory rites were believed to have originated.