Tonight’s Opera: Donizetti meets Che Guevara
OperaSlippedisc, courtesy of OperaVision streams glorious comedy and impeccable coloratura to combine in Donzetti’s La fille du régiment, incarnated by Marie, the feisty tomboy raised by a regiment of French soldiers. What can stand in the path of true love for Tonio is the young Swiss villager who conquers her heart – and nails a few high Cs on the way?
Director Luis Ernesto Doñas sets the action in central America, turning the revolutionary French fighting against conservative Tyrol into the struggle for Cuban liberation. Cuba as a place where two worlds confront and clash, a colourful one projected into the future and the other in black and white locked in nostalgic feelings about the past. This production was the unequivocal success of the 2021 Festival Donizetti Bergamo in co-production with the Teatro Lirico Nacional de Cuba, where it has already made a very successful debut. Singing in French the young Spanish soprano Sara Blanch plays the leading role of Marie, Sulpice by Paolo Bordogna, while the role of Tonio, with his legendary aria of at least eight high Cs, is entrusted to the renowned and charismatic American tenor John Osborn.
Available from Friday 13 May 2022 at 19.00 CET/ 18.00 London/ 13.00 NY
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“sets the action in central America, turning the revolutionary French fighting against conservative Tyrol into the struggle for Cuban liberation. Cuba as a place where two worlds confront and clash, a colourful one projected into the future and the other in black and white locked in nostalgic feelings about the past. ”
Is there a fashionable checkbox he missed? Not many at any rate. LGBTQ and the Ukraine war are missing, but perhaps he saves them for the reprise. None of the above supported by the libretto. Pass. Write your own libretto, Luis Ernesto Doñas, if the struggle for Cuban liberation is so dear to your heart, and commission music from one of the contemporary geniuses, then we’ll see how many people rush into the opera house to witness your joint effort. By the way, the war in Tyrol is of no importance to the original plot. John Osborn, alas, is past his best years vocally, as to charisma, this is a word I’d use very sparsely on principle.
I don’t know how it is taught in the UK these days, but in my childhood schooling there, and in later studies in North America, Central America consisted of the seven countries in the isthmus between Mexico to the north and Colombia to the south.
There are some organisational inclusions of other countries — I believe the UN lumps Mexico in with it, though it is generally considered part of North America. But I have never heard of Cuba being considered to be part of Central America.
I am Cuban-American, lived here since 1962. Some things about my past still make me flinch. One of those is the preponderance of the use Ché Guevara, as some type of symbol which represents Cuba. WHY is it necessary to click-bait your readers with a loaded headline which in fact does not represent this opera? I am more disappointed with Slipped Disc than I am offended with this reference.
Is Guevara a character that displaced one of Donizetti’s characters for some “Henze-ian” reason? I don’t know, I may be rambling… but this whole situation disgusts me.