The Castell de Perelada Festival kicks off this week with a shorter edition due to the construction of a new auditorium, starting on Friday, July 28, and running until Saturday, August 5. With a program consisting of opera, music, and dance, a total of 11 shows will be held this year in the Carmen church and the castle's viewpoint, with British Freddie De Tommaso being the first to take the stage. The young tenor will return to the Empordà festival after debuting there this same year, in its first Easter edition. De Tomasso, accompanied on the piano by conductor Audrey Saint-Gil, will offer a recital consisting of a selection of arias by Giuseppe Verdi.
A day later, on Saturday 29, soprano Diana Damrau and French bass Nicolas Testé will arrive, accompanied on the piano by Helmut Deutsch. The German will return to Perelada after her debut in 2015, performing, alongside Testé, a journey through opera, operetta, lied, and songs, with works by Duparc, Strauss, Gounod, and Donizetti. The weekend will close with the show De Monteverdi en Piazzolla by the Cappella Mediterranea, directed by Leonardo García Alarcón, with the participation of soprano Mariana Flores and tenor Diego Valentín Flores.
The week will start strong with maestro and violagambist Jordi Savall on Monday, July 31. The Catalan musician will offer a recital with six musicians from the ensemble he directs, Le Concert Des Nations, with works by composers such as Giullaume Dumanoir, Monsier de Sainte-Colombe, Marin Marais, and François Couperie.
On Tuesday, August 1, the flamenco of Barcelona's Ana Morales, National Dance Award 2022, can be seen. The dancer will present her show En la cuerda floja, accompanied by José Quevedo "Bolita", Paquito González, and Pablo Martín. This will be followed by a tribute to soprano Victoria de los Ángeles on the centenary of her birth on Wednesday, August 2, with Núria Rial and Rubén Fernández Aguirre.
The week will be crowned on Friday, August 4, by the comic opera The Telephone, or l'amour à trois, about a love triangle in which the third is the mobile phone. This is the first operatic project by Bilbao actress, playwright, and director María Goiricelaya, winner of a Max Award for her adaptation of Yerma. For the grand finale of this 37th edition, the festival has entrusted local artists Serena Sáenz and Xabier Anduaga for a recital of arias and songs, accompanied by pianist Maciej Pikulski.
In this edition, other performances will be the workshop-concert by Imma Santacreu and Hèctor Parra (July 29), and a prelude to the dance and piano recital ALBA, with choreographer Aimar Pérez Galí (July 30), with its premiere scheduled for 2024 at the Mercat de les Flors. They will be performed before the main shows and are part of the Ex Ex cycle, a window for experimentation and dialogue with different artistic disciplines, as well as a first step towards what will be in the future the creator cycles of the Performing Arts Classroom and the artistic residencies that the new auditorium will be able to host. The new space, which will be located in the castle gardens, is expected to be ready by next summer. It will involve an investment of more than four million euros in the first phase.
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