Pablo García-López

Lyric comedy in three acts. Broadcast live from El Teatro de la Zarzuela on October 17, 2019.

In the early 20th century, Countess Carmen Díaz de Mendoza Aguado, inspired yet frustrated by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, sets out to write her own version but struggles with doubt, societal pressures, and a haunting inner voice, leading to her play’s failure. Decades later, fragments of her life and work resurface through obituaries and fading memories. In 2024, a modern composer seeks to rediscover and reinvent her lost opera, conversing with the echoes of the past to reclaim the Countess’s silenced voice and vision.

The musical notes of this Puccini masterpiece provide the starting point and foundation for a new, highly successful collaboration between Riccardo Chailly and Davide Livermore. In their interpretation, there is “no moment, no movement, that goes against the musical meaning” (R. Chailly). The result is an energetic, authentic, and atmospherically strong Bohème, “in which every sacred phrase receives its own orchestral colour, its own dynamic and its own expression.” (Corriere della Sera)

At the Teatro Real in Madrid, director Laurent Pelly and conductor Giacomo Sagripanti get to grips with Gioachino Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) – a delightful opera buffa teeming with colourful characters!