The Palau de les Arts will co-produce its inaugural opera Carmen with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

04.07.2007

The Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía will co-produce with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino the new version of Carmen, which will be directed by filmmaker Carlos Saura and will raise the curtain on the second season of the Valencian coliseum on October 27.
The filmmaker is already fully immersed in the preparations for this opera. In this regard, Saura and his team of collaborators held a working meeting today with the Director of the Palau de les Arts to jointly analyze various aspects of this new production.

Carmen is the second collaboration between the Valencian opera house and the Florentine opera house, following the critical and public success of the first two operas of the Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy last season.

The Palau de les Arts is thus consolidating its prestige and quality by reaching co-production agreements with the best international theaters. In addition to Carmen, this season the auditorium will co-produce Siegfried with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Last season, the Palau de les Arts co-produced A Well-Paid Walk with the National Theatre. Carmen premieres on October 27.

Maestro Lorin Maazel will be in charge of the musical direction of Georges Bizet's Carmen at its premiere on October 27 at the Valencia Coliseum, while Maestro Zubin Mehta will conduct this co-production in Florence in May 2008.

The staging of the opera Carmen will begin in early September, while the rehearsal schedule in the Main Hall will begin on the 24th of that same month.

This will not be the first time the veteran filmmaker has tackled the universal character created by Prosper Mérimée. Carlos Saura already directed a stage version of this opera, along with his brother Antonio Saura, at the Festival dei Due Mondi (Italy) in 1995, in a modern and personal interpretation of the story.

Saura also made a film adaptation of Carmen in 1983, which was a great international success and was awarded at Cannes, as well as being selected for the Academy Awards.

In addition to the co-productions of Carmen and Siegfried, the Palau de les Arts will present a new production of Puccini's Turandot this coming season. The program is rounded out by Philip Glass's La Belle et la bête, Maazel's 1984, Verdi's Don Carlo, Sergei Prokofiev's Betrothal in the Monastery, Handel's Orlando, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, and Puccini's Madama Butterfly.