This is the story of how a semi -professional singing group in Banyoles came to a three -month season in a Paris theater, after passing through the and a five -year tour with hundreds of bowls in Catalonia, Spain and Europe. Everything, thanks to the idea that the playwright and director Jordi Purtí had in 2010 when he went to find them: what would happen if some of the most famous opera passages in history were drawn from context and becoming a everyday scenes a surrealistic point? What if the arias, openings and hearts of Verdi, Rossini, Bellini or Mozart sounded only chapel With the voices of singers who also act as actors pulling gags and using gestural humor? The result was Operettaa small international success of the Catalan theater that the company has now re -operated. It can be seen from July 8 to 20 at the Condal Theater in Barcelona.
Fourteen years after the first Operettaand the doors of the two weeks of functions that will do this July at the Condal Theater in Barcelona, we talk with the musical director and founder of Cor de Teatre, David Costa. “We didn’t expect anything. We were a group of friends who wanted to sing and do theater, always chapel Because we like vocal polyphony and we feel musicians. Many of us come from teaching: there are teachers from music schools, elementary schools and institutes. We survive with different jobs, but we have a totally solid structure that has allowed us to produce shows for more than 25 years. ” Operetta They have just presented the family show to Banyoles Sounds at the area.
Voice jugglers
Costa defines his training as “jugglers of voice and physical theater”. One of the emblematic scenes of the play is the runners of the Tour de France: “ This is very difficult to do. He is a concrete to six voices where we do everything, the polyphony, the solos and the instruments.And you are moving all the time (they simulate that they are cycling) and tired very much. We could say that in the play there are three scores, the stage, the stage, the stage. We sing the instruments we use onomatopoeias … Dara-Dara-Dan, Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa … this is what we call the harmonious pillow.
Of the many anecdotes of the international tour ofOperettaDavid Costa highlights the Mena de reality they lived at the Avignon Festival: “We stayed to a chateau (castle). When we performed at the Liceu, we were discovered by some French producers who later produced other shows. We were told that we would go to Avignon, and I only put them as a condition that we could go there the 20 members of the heart with our family because it was July. And we were housed in this castle that had outside showers where we shower was naked and, next to, a field of potatoes with the farmer who saw us from the tractor and was getting closer. In addition, since it was an old farm we were put on dry toilets outside because inside we could not defecate all together. “
Asked how the traditional opera audience received, the purists, a show that shake the genre, Costa says that “very well. For example, the soprano came to see us a night at the National Theater and told us that he had loved it, he waited for us and even sent me a thank you.” The director of Choir of Theater concludes: “It is very difficult to explain in words the show, I can only tell you that who goes into the theater to discover us falls in love and ends up applauding. And if we have returned, we have done it because the audience asked us.”
You can listen to this interview, issued to the Everything is comedy of the SER chain.
