Music: Astor Piazzolla
Lyrics: Horacio Ferrer
Director/Choreographer: Carlos Pons Guerra
Conductor: Natalia Luis-Bassa
David Ward, Artistic Director of the Leeds Opera Festival, is nothing if not daring in his choice of operas – next year a Sherlock Holmes world premiere! This year his target is Latin opera, with the great Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla’sMaria de Buenos Aires being one of two challenging offerings.
Director Carlos Pons Guerra admits that the plot is “absurd and impossible even for opera” and his account of its oddities leaves one in total agreement: after Maria’s death at the end of Act 1, among her adventures in Act 2 are getting mixed up with an underground circle of psychoanalysts and being chased (and ultimately impregnated) by a group of drunken puppets – you get the idea. Yet for most of the time the opera is serious. The answer is that the opera is allegorical, the script packed with references to the Mass and the Bible, often distorted, and musical instruments and forms – in the First Act Maria falls in love with an accordion!
Guerra transforms the script by excising most of the literal parts (many of them originally acted and danced to instrumental accompaniment) and replacing them with a queer agenda. It would be saying too much to suggest that this is immediately comprehensible, but he cuts the totally baffling and instead uses six talented dancers to suggest an LGBTQ+ world and to build a tension around Maria. Lu Herbert’s designs are a bit special, too, huge would-be religious icons dominating the bare, wooden, split-level stage.
The narrator is the mysterious figure of El Duende, here split in two, with both spoken and sung story-telling. Both Carlos Felipe Cerchiaro and Ricardo Panela are excellent, Cerchiaro tending to rich sung delivery, Panela given the more cynical and astringent lines, often spoken. Julia Martins Solomon is outstanding as Maria. For much of Act 1 she is confined to wordless vocals, but then comes the song, magnificently delivered, where she expresses who she is, Maria of Buenos Aires. Her acting, movement and singing are riveting from this point on.
The 11-piece band under Natalia Luis-Bassa is similar to the augmented version of his own band that Piazzolla used in 1968. In the absence of a bandoneon Valerie Barr excels on accordion and Luis-Bassa is thoroughly idiomatic throughout, both in the tangos and other Argentinian dances and in the more elaborate fugues that Piazzolla set up: from accordion to guitar to flute…
The music is compelling, the action often incomprehensible, but always involving, a main reason for this the predominantly Hispanic nature of the participants whose understanding of the poetry and music is transmitted to the audience.
Runs until 2nd September 2023.
The Reviews Hub Score
Ambitious and challenging
