Stage Concerts (Opera)

Artists

Granada Festival Baroque Academy

Choir of the City of Granada Orchestra

Héctor Eliel Márquez choir director

Carlos Mena vocal consultant

Gabriela Salaverri costume design

Carmen Castañón staging design

Eduardo Bastrina, ligthening

Aarón Martín choreography and direction assistant

Rita Cosentino staging director

Aarón Zapico music director

Programme

The Fairy Queen

Music by Henry Purcell (1659-1695) with anonymous libretto on A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

A new Granada Festival Production

Concert with no interval

A Surprisingly Magic Place. Reality and fantasy linked by music

This is a very special staging project of the Festival’s Baroque Academy, born within the framework of the Manuel de Falla Courses. One of the great figures in the interpretation of the Spanish Baroque, Aarón Zapico –born in Asturias–, leads, with the support of Carlos Mena in the training of the voices, various vocal and instrumental groups of young musicians for a new Festival production made from a work full of magic and staged by Rita Cosentino. As a genius of musical theatre, Henry Purcell visited the enchanted world of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with The Fairy Queen. The work, composed in 1692, is framed within a typically English genre, that of the dramatic opera or semi-opera (as it is often called today), in which great musical scenes were inserted within a spoken theatre play. Purcell raised the genre to dazzling artistic levels by combining irresistible melody and lively rhythms with a harmonic richness unique to his time.