‘The altarpiece of Master Pedro’, by Manuel de Falla. Grenada Festival. City of Granada Orchestra. Aaron Zapico, director. Etcetera Company (Enrique Lanz). Palace of Carlos V, Granada (22/VI/2023).
An exceptional start to the Granada Festival, which offers an intense program in this edition, in highly differentiated areas of musical and dance expression, and in which you can find renowned orchestras with conductors who face the future (Gimeno), the Youth Orchestra of Spain with the veteran and undisputed maestro Inbal, soloists, camera, baroque, in short, a soundtrack that combines with the beauties of the Granada stages.
There are few occasions when space-time coordinates are so conducive to us. Today marks one hundred years since the premiere of this magisterial work of the 20th century and the occasion took place in 1923; On June 25, the author Manuel de Falla, and the artists Hermenegildo Lanz and Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, responsible for the assembly of the scene and puppets that represent the action, were working together in the great hall of the Princess of Polignac to represent this complex work for the first time. described by Cervantes in chapter XXVI of the second part of Don Quixote. He was accompanied by the small orchestra and the three vocal soloists, but also several important musicians collaborated in the puppeteer manipulation. There were among others Ricard Viñes and his disciple Francis Poulenc. Now, this work written and dreamed of in Granada by Falla (García Lorca was close by), has brilliantly opened the 72nd Granada Festival, with a show in the Palace of Carlos V. Another happy coincidence, Lanz’s grandson, Enrique, he designed, directed scenery and projections in a work that we already saw at the Liceu a few years ago, although adapted to the particular conditions of the Granada Palace. A monumental job by a large team since manipulating puppets the size of those that occupy the foreground is very complex. There are three scene plans: musicians, characters watching the performance, including Don Quixote, and the little theater in which the story of Melisendra’s liberation takes place. This little scene has a singular appeal since it harmonized masterfully with the beauty of the musical phrases that accompany it, with a strong dose of scenic beauty. The biggest dolls, in addition to the Trujaman boy, the Qijote, find their voices in the magnificent bass José Antonio López and the soprano Alicia Amo.
This role of the Trickster is originally written for the white voice of a child, and in this case I suppose that the director led the soprano –who sings the melodies indicated in the score very well– to establish a falsetto pretending to imitate the child, but that already, from his first words at the beginning of the work, he squeaks, and his presence is important because he is the one who presents the different scenes. Wonderful work by David Alegret in the role of Maese Pedro; his voice goes very well with the character’s character.
The musical program chose to emphasize the sound and atmosphere of the Baroque – there is a curious insistence on the part of some specialists in classifying this work as neoclassical, a label with multiple variables that do not facilitate its perception. The music was raised without interruptions or applause, and they slipped with good character and good work by the conductor, until the initial symphony of the Altarpiece. He preceded it by a suite of Telemann and Boismortier’s Don Quichotte with overly martial percussion, and good string work. Thus, El retablo showed a very subtle profile, elegant in the phrasing, although this was to the detriment of its character as 20th century music, written a few years before the Concerto for harpsichord that Falla premiered in Barcelona in 1926. As we said, this Intimate character, it was very similar to the introspective coloring of some scenes in the little theater, although El retablo demands in its score moments of greater intensity and brilliance, planes and edges. A production effort that deserves applause given that it is a work of extreme complexity, very difficult, and with corners -like the wonderful last scene in which Don Quixote, after destroying the little theater, sings his passion to the unattainable lady-, a difficult moment to represent given the dimension of the protagonist doll. The full Palace in the two initial performances makes us see the interest in these forms of expression that have marked the audible avant-garde of the twentieth century.
