Roberto Abbado and Paul Curran close the opera season at Les Arts with Britten's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

Roberto Abbado, on the podium, and Paul Curran, with stage director, perform the lyrical course at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía with the opera 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', by Benjamin Britten, which will premiere on June 10.

The Milanese master and the Scottish director appeared at the press round, together with the mayor of Les Arts, Davide Livermore, to present the fourth new production of the center d'arts in the 2015-2016 season.

'A Midsummer Night's Dream', an opera in three acts with music by Benjamin Britten and a book by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, based on the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, inaugurates a month of June dedicated to the English playwright in the centenary of his death, as Davide Livermore has explained.

It is, in addition to the English composer's first work, “a dels genis of the 20th century” performed by the Valencian Community Orchestra (OCV). “A score of choral distribution and of great theatrical force, which needs solid artistic vimens to be represented,” the mayor said.

In this sense, he explained that Les Arts brings together a distribution of consolidated values of the English repertoire together with the emerging artists, the artists of the Center Plácido Domingo and the artists of the Escolania de la Mare de Déu dels Desemparats.

The soprano Nadine Sierra, whom the Valencian public will remember for 'Don Pasquale' under the direction of mateix Mestre Abbado in 2015, and the countertenor Christopher Lowrey, one of the new values in the seua tessitura, encapsulate the distribution with Tytania and Oberon, king of the fades.

The cast is completed by Brandon Cedel (Theseus), Iuliia Safonova (Hippolyta), Mark Milhofer (Lysander), Dan Kempson (Demetrius), Nozomi Kato (Hermia), Leah Partridge (Helena), Conal Coad (Bottom), Richard Burkhard (Quince), Keith Jameson (Flute), Tyler Simpson (Snug), William Ferguson (Snout), Michael Borth (Starveling) and Chris Agius Darmanin (Puck).

Roberto Abbado, chief conductor of the OCV, has highlighted Britten's innovative capacity in this work, which introduces new elements for the relevance of the figure of the countertenor, the role of the children's cors to bring out a “non-human” and “magical” color and its orchestral mysteries. “It is a score with a great amount of colors and colors, which is an extra pleasure for a director,” he said.

Paul Curran, stage director, set designer and choreographer of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” debuts at Les Arts with this production, which includes costumes by Gabriella Ingram and lighting by David Jacques.

Segons has highlighted Livermore, the Scottish director, a versatile artist recognized in the main theaters of the world, who will also be the master of the artistic director of Les Arts. For Curran, the main difficulty of the opera, as a stage director, consists of his distribution between 19 papers for the soloist, “all in all he is a star.”

'A Midsummer Night's Dream' also offers an incredible wealth of work - Curran has analyzed -, “since it is the only opera based on Shakespeare that uses the playwright's actual text without changing it to different languages.”

Curran, as he has advanced, sets the action of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the ruins of a old temple in which the three dimensions of Shakespeare's fantasy converge. The director, also Mateix, has highlighted the three thematic themes on which the work is based: politics, religion and sex. "You will love it," he has said. l'scotch.

After the 10th, there will be more performances on the 12th, 14th, 16th and 18th of June, on the 16th the North American soprano Jennifer O'Loughlin will sing the role of the queen of the fades.

William Shakespeare's voluntary activities

This month of June, Davide Livermore has remembered, the Aula Magistral has a dramatized reading of the classic Shakespeare, with public performances of the didactic program, on June 8 and 9, and a performance for the general public on June 11 at 6:00 p.m. Les Arts presents its own new theatrical production, with text adapted by Anselmo Alonso, and actors from La Farsería.

In parallel, students will be able to analyze in the literary workshop “De llibre a llibret”, the adaptation of the theatrical text, which the English playwright wrote at the end of the 20th century. XVI, to the opera language of the s. XX in the work of Benjamin Britten.

New website

The mayor of Les Arts has announced the launch, this week, of a new design of the website www.lesarts.com that has continued to be carried out internally by the theater systems department.