I remember their TV shows: wines, opera…
In clau de vi and Nit d’arts, on TV3: I wanted to infect you with my taste for wine and opera.
Where had he learned?
From Josep Roca I learned about wines in a few months what I learned from others in twenty years.
And who taught him about opera?
As a teenager I entered a music store and proposed to the salesperson, Llorenç: “If you enlighten me about classical music, I will buy you a record every fifteen days.”
Did Llorenç accept the pact?
Yes, and one day he gave me to listen to Manon Lescaut, by Puccini: my first opera.
AND?
I was excited! She was seventeen years old. From then on I only asked for operas. The album Tutto Pavarotti arrived and that voice moved me.
Recommend an opera to get started.
Cavalleria rusticana, by Mascagni! His intermezzo: the three most beautiful minutes in the history of opera. 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 find out the plots. I have done it a lot: the pleasure is in repeating.
Is opera so important?
It sneaks into our lives every day: Carmen in a slot machine, Nessun sleeping in the harangue of Guardiola’s Barça locker room, others in advertising tunes, 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: when she was older she went to the Liceu one day when they were performing this opera… and there she found out what she sang as a child! Her friend is the journalist Helena García Melero.
There will be more similar cases.
I have asked five friends who are not involved in opera… but who have ever been moved by an opera, an aria, a fragment…
And how has it been?
They have told me beautiful experiences. And I have recorded them in an audiovisual which is the main 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, lyrical singers, choir…and enriched with audiovisual resources.
Paints well.
With Simfonova, a business and cultural project, we have put on half a dozen of these concerts: L’òpera dels amics is our seventh tour. He wants to see?
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 you don’t know anything about opera?
Nothing. Boris something, and he’s been on all my shows: his frivolity adorns an extreme sensitivity for the arts.
What has Boris told you?
She envies Carmen for surrounding 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 her scruples.
And what does Toni Clapés have with opera?
The first time he went to the Liceu, they were playing La bohème, and since he heard the song Quando m’en vò, he went crazy… and he plays it at home whenever he’s down and needs to boost his morale.
I will try…
Works! Oh, I also recommend the television series Mozart in the jungle, where Samson and Delilah plays…
He tells me that another friend of the opera is Carles Sans…
Yes, as a comedian he is, he tells us about Rigoletto and the character Garrick, the hunchbacked jester who must make the royal court laugh… no matter how annoyed he may be inside.
This is what happens to comedians and comedians…
“They have taken away my right to cry!” he laments. “I have everything but I’m sad,” a guy tells his psychiatrist, who prescribes this: “Go see a Garrick performance and he’ll see…”. “I can’t,” the guy replies: “Garrick is me!”
Tremendous. And Josep Roca, wine poet, what does he tell you about opera?
Transpose the music from operas to wines: Thaïs’s Meditación is like a Burgundy, feminine, subtle… Tannhauser, in his Cançó de l’estrella, is an obscure, dense, nuanced, baritone air, like a dense Priorat wine , doughy, slow…
How long is the opera of friends?
Two hours and a quarter, a concert accessible to all audiences: here we act like Pretty Woman, a film that has universalized the libretto of La Traviata.
