Ainadamar
Birmingham Symphony Hall
Der Rosenkavalier
Royal Festival Hall
In a series of concerts in Symphony Hall with the perhaps unlikely title Passion from Birmingham, Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar was given a semi-staged performance with the cast that made the bestselling DG recording three years ago. It’s repeated at the Barbican. With few genuine expectations and a fairly large dose of prejudice, I have to admit that the 80 minutes the piece takes were mesmerising, though I suspect that that might not happen a second time. The Argentinian composer operates in what is invariably called an eclectic idiom, and uses it to serve a strongly political and humanitarian agenda, with religious overtones — are they different from undertones? In this work, more a cantata than an opera, we have the story of the murder of Lorca, but the main character is Margarita Xirgu, one of his collaborators, who tried but failed to get him to leave Spain before he was killed by falangists.
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