Jonas Kaufmann plants his Liceu audience. The German tenor has canceled the expected participation in Adriana Lecouvreur in June and, without waiting, at the very least, for the Gran Teatre to find a suitable replacement to announce the change, he has recorded on his website that on the same June 16, 2024, when the premiere of Francisco Cilèa’s opera in Barcelona has been announced, he will take part in a lied concert in Vienna’s park. In fact, she has a Tosca scheduled at the Bavarian Opera in July, which will require prior rehearsals.
And, as if it were a full circle, the Liceu announces in its place the return of the prodigal Roberto Alagna, who also stopped the audience at the Rambla Coliseum when he claimed that he did not feel comfortable with the assembly of Tosca signed by Rafael R. Villalobos last season and preferred to join the cast of a musical in Paris.
The French tenor, of proven solvency and vocal beauty, will replace Kaufmann in the role of Maurizio, who already played the 2011-2012 Liceu season. But it will not be on the 16th, 19th and 22nd that the German tenor was contracted. The British Freddie de Tommaso, who was announced for the second cast at the Gran Teatre, takes the lead in the first with the soprano Sonya Yoncheva as Adriana Lecouvreur. So Alagna will sing with his wife, Aleksandra Kurzak, who will then be performing Madama Butterfly at the Teatro Real in Madrid. The Polish soprano will therefore join Adriana Lecouvreur’s cast on the 17th and 20th, given the absence of Eleonora Buratto. The function on the 29th will be sung by Alagna and paired with Neapolitan soprano Valeria Sepe.
The idyll of high school could be left behind with Kaufmann, who was received so generously in his staged opera debut at the Rambla theater, with that sonata Andrea Chénier with Sondra Radvanovsky and Carlos Álvarez. That incontestable trio that delighted opera fans in March 2018 will remain as a memory, but, taking into account the reasons alleged by the Germanic tenor, lyceism could interpret a certain lack of respect. The Liceu limits itself to talking about “reasons unrelated to the theater”, but, according to La Vanguardia, Kaufmann’s representative alleged vocal impairments…, after which, without further explanation, he canceled unilaterally the performance of June 2024 and then appeared announced in another square.
