I remember his TV shows: wines, opera…
En clau de vi and Nit d’arts, on TV3: I wanted to share with you my taste for wine and opera.
Where did he learn it?
From Josep Roca I learned about wines in a few months what I learned about others in twenty years.
And who taught him about opera?
As a teenager I went to a music store and proposed to the salesman, Llorenç: “If you explain classical music to me, I’ll buy you a record every fortnight”.
Did Llorenç accept the pact?
Yes, and one day he gave me Puccini’s Manon Lescaut: my first opera.
I?
I was excited! I was seventeen years old. From then on I only ordered operas. Tutto Pavarotti came on – I was moved.
Recommend an opera to start with.
Cavalleria rusticana, by Mascagni! His intermezzo: the most beautiful three minutes in the history of opera. Do you remember the final scene of The Godfather III?
The staircase…
Yes, it’s the music that accompanies the ending.
Another tip.
Listen to opera libretto in hand: read it and learn about the arguments. I’ve done it a lot: the taste consists in repetition.
Is opera so important?
It sneaks into our lives every day: Carmen in a slot machine, Nessun dorma in Guardiola’s Barça dressing room harangue, others in the tunes of commercials, TV shows, movies…
Or is the woman as mobile as a feather in the wind…
A friend tells me that as a child, in her father’s car, the whole family sang “va pensierooooo” with changed lyrics.
Nabuco.
She didn’t know: growing up she went to the Liceu one day when they were performing this opera… and she knew what she was singing as a child! The friend is Helena García Melero.
There must be more similar cases.
I have gathered five friends who are strangers to opera…but who have ever been moved by an opera, an aria, a fragment…
And how did it go?
They told me beautiful experiences. And I have recorded them in an audiovisual which is precisely the guiding thread of The opera of friends.
What is the opera of friends?
An operatic show: a large-format concert, with an orchestra of sixty musicians, lyric singers, choir… and enriched with audiovisual resources.
paint well
With Simfonova, a business and cultural project, we have staged half a dozen of these concerts: The opera of friends. It’s our seventh tour. Do you want to see her?
Yeah.
Tomorrow Tuesday at the Gran Teatre del Liceu.
Who are the five friends?
In addition to Helena García Melero, my beloved Josep Roca, Toni Clapés, Carles Sans, from the Tricicle, and Boris Izaguirre.
And they don’t know anything about opera?
Nothing. Boris a bit, and he’s been in all my shows: his frivolity adorns an extreme sensibility for the arts.
What did Boris tell him?
That he envies Carmen because she surrounds herself with all kinds of men. We can see her today as an empowered woman or as an egoist who takes advantage of her physique without scruples.
And what does Toni Clapés have to do with opera?
The first time he went to the Liceu, they were programming La bohème, and since he heard the song Quando m’en vò, he went back in spirit: he plays it at home whenever he’s down and needs to cheer himself up.
I will try…
It works! Oh, I also recommend the TV series Mozart in the jungle, in which Samson and Delilah play…
He tells me that another friend of the opera is Carles Sans…
Yes, as the comedian that he is, he tells us about Rigoletto and the character Garrick, the hunchbacked jester who has to make the royal court laugh…no matter how disgusted he is inside.
This happens to comedians and comedians…
“They have taken away my right to cry!”, he laments. “I have everything but I’m sad”, a guy explains to his psychiatrist, who prescribes: “Go see a Garrick performance and you’ll see…”. “I can’t – replies the guy -: I’m Garrick!”
formidable And Josep Roca, poet of wine, what does he tell you about opera?
Transferring music from operas to wines: Thaïs’s Meditation is like a Burgundy, feminine, subtle… Tannhauser, in his Cançó de l’estrella, is a dark, dense, nuanced, baritone air, like a wine from Priorat dense, pasty, slow…
How long is the opera of friends?
Two and a quarter hours, a concert accessible to all audiences: here we are playing Pretty Woman, a film that has universalized the libretto of La Traviata.
