Manuel de Falla's La Vida Breve in Alicante with Sandra Fernandez and Miguel Ortega

La Vida Breve by Manuel de Falla is a problematic work. Its problem stems mainly from the fact that it is an opera that lasts just over an hour. Productions of it generally have to be combined with another short work. Now there is no shortage of one act operas, but there is a shortage of companies willing to juxtapose two works of inevitably different styles on one programme. Opera North in Leeds did it in 2015, staging it alongside Gianni Schicchi of Puccini in a tragic-to-ridiculous pairing. It worked, but not every opera company is as keen to take risks as Opera North. Bluebeard’s Castle is an obvious pairing, but the emotional territory is perhaps too similar to that of La Vida Breve. Just how many women does an audience want to kill off in one evening? And so it is via concert performances that audiences are most likely to experience Manuel de Falla’s early opera, and so it was in ADDA, Alicante last night, under the direction of Manuel Ortega.

Opera in the concert hall bring the music to front stage. Yes, the singers are there, and they have to perform, but usually there is little action. It has to be admitted that even in a full staging of La Vida Breve it might be hard to find much action. A femme fatale is in love with a man above her social class. She laments the fact that lonely birds die, that lone flowers wither. A chorus extols the virtue of working for a living, stressing the identity that shared tasks can promote. But they do repeat the fact that it is better to be born the hammer rather than the anvil, a none-too-subtle reference to the difference in social class between the two lovers, Salud and Paco. Salud’s lover, Paco, does dessert her. He marries someone else, a woman from a social class similar to his own. No doubt there were family ties to cement and faces to be saved. Salud finds the prospect of solitude lethal. There is not a great deal in the libretto, and what there is repeats the standpoint of the principal characters quite a lot.

So with the music and singing centre stage, what are we to make of the performance? Well, it was excellent. Certainly committed. Certainly both lyrical and exciting. Sandra Fernandez as Salud was inevitably and almost permanently centre stage. Both her voice and her expression were finally tuned to the role. She came across as a faithful, committed and sincere lover, who almost worshiped Paco. His rejection, therefore, went to the heart of her beliefs, the essence of a very identity. Francesco Pio Galasso as Paco sang the role with both passion and virtuosity, but the role is problematic. Throughout Paco looked and sounded sincere, but he went off and married someone else. What was Paco intending to do? Keep face with society while keeping Salud as his piece on the side? Like Steva in Janacek’s Jenufa, Paco is a role that does not engender sympathy.

Angel Odena and Marta Infante as Salud’s family members gave stunningly expressive performances. There was real character in both their roles, despite the fact that their texts are neither extensive nor varied.

And so to the music. For Manuel de Falla, La Vida Breve was an early work, and one can hear how much the young composer was still searching for a voice. The flamenco style cadences that characterized his music are here, but there is also the language of symbolism, a little Bartok of Bluebeard or Wooden Prince, perhaps, some of Schreker as well. There is some Debussy. They were passages when I felt this could be Pelleas and Melisande. There is a little Wagner and some Strauss in the orchestration via the splitting of the strings. But perhaps the most revolutionary episode comes when the music becomes flamenco, and the characteristic gravelly singing erupts, accompanied by a guitar. It would be an intervention, but Manuel de Falla is already skilled enough as a composer to weave the transitions to and from these interludes into the overall scoring and concept. Pedro Jimenez “Perette” and Basilio García gave perfect performances of this music.

La Vida Breve thus comes across as a convincing work, spectacular in its orchestration and at times in its musical ideas, but one dimensional as a drama. This is not a criticism. It has some very good company on the opera stage in this category. It is a work that deserves to be heard more often.