Prokofiev, Romeo y Julieta en ADDA Alicante

ADDA·SIMFÒNICA ALICANTE

JOSEP VICENT, director titular

ASUN NOALES, dirección escénica y coreografía

Rosanna Freda, asistente de coreografía

Joaquín Hernández, Diseño Iluminación

Luis Crespo, Diseño espacio escénico

Ana Estéban, Vestuario

Federica Fasano, Investigación

Germán Antón, Fotografía

Bailarines: Deivid Barrera, Rosanna Freda, Diana Grytsailo, Iván Merino, Alice Pieri,
Laura Martín, Joel Mesa Gutiérrez, Salvador Rocher, Theo Vanpop, Jennifer Wallen,
Samuel Olariaga, Araitz Lasa

What can surprise in a performance of music that is almost known by heart, providing a scenario for a ballet whose story one has heard and seen performed countless times? The answer is just about everything. A story is as old as its current telling, if the tellers have told it their way. This was very much the case last night in Alicante when the ADDA Orchestra under Josep Vicent played Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet to the choreography of Asun Noales.

One always needs to be reminded of the power of human imagination, and this performance will live log in the memory. Here there were no sumptuous costumes, no monumental sets. Staging was accomplished with a few cubes that could serve as seats, walls or plinths, and a pair of steel scaffolds that had vegetation on one side. These could be rotated to present a garden, a balcony or a tomb. Costumes were minimal, with the feuding Montagues and Capulets needing no obvious uniforms to identify their allegiance.

But what was on display was raw emotion, vividly portrayed by a quite excellent choreography. There was not a single gesture in the audience’s view merely for the sake of the gesture. Nothing was purely technical. Everything meant something.

The audience was left in no doubt about the sexual nature of Romeo and Juliet’s mutual attraction. And the fight scenes were utterly convincing, despite the fact that no weapons were ever visible.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the whole evening was the portrayal of Father Lawrence. Prokofiev’s sensuous music was the raw material, but the choreography depicted a character that was sinister, clearly devout and all too willing to help, but also someone who wished to envelop and control. It was a depiction close to witchcraft, but probably got closer to a medieval mind’s interpretation of religion, with its capacity to deliver eternal damnation and suffering than any other I have seen.

Rosanna Freda and Salvador Rocher in the principal roles were hardly off stage, but other performances were also superb, not least the Mercutio, the Tibalt and the Nurse. And everything was delivered by a dozen dancers.

This was a minimalist production with wholly modern choreography, but the humanity that was depicted was direct, very moving, and communicated so vividly that it rendered considerations of “style” simply irrelevant.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Prisuelo-Sanford and Ars Musicandum in Alicante

 

Like most places on the planet, the pandemic has denied us the opportunity of hearing live music in a hall with volume for several months. Our last concerts in Alfas del Pi were in the first week of March, so imagine the elation created by the granting of free tickets by ballot to two restricted-access contemporary music events in ADDA, Alacante! And imagine the elation produced by the quality of the experience generated!

In one of the most original musical evenings of some sixty years of concert-going, Mario Prisuelo and Maximiliano Sanford offered an evening entitled Oceánica - Un océano no siempre tranquilo….  It was billed as a dance event, but the program suggested a piano recital. Intrigued, we awaited the start with the Steinway up against the left edge of the stage. The dancer entered from within the audience, to a refrain of four notes, slapped with his palms against a bare chest. He continued as his pianist also took the stage and loosened his formal tie. And then the concert began with the Opus 34 Preludes of Shostakovich. The four slaps, clearly, were a toneless version of DSCH, Shostakovich’s musical signature, indicating the presence of a vulnerable individual, no more, no less.

Mario Prisuelo’s playing of the Preludes was breathtakingly beautiful. Maximiliano Sanford danced an interpretation of the music, his ability to leap headfirst and land silently was beautiful as well as both evocative and unintrusive. The combination could have failed, could have been overtly pretentious, but in fact it worked supremely well, the movement complementing and interpreting the musical shapes. The contrasting allegro and adagio, major and minor being seen via this inventive choreography as deeply felt emotion, a Romanticism that many might not associate with the music of Shostakovich.

A short speech located the whole experience as a voyage to Ithaca, a perfect destination where an individual can obtain self-realization, despite threats along the way. Projected text floated across the stage and at no point did it intrude into the musical space.

At the end of the piece, the performers advanced the piano across the stage, probably to signify progress on the journey. Then we heard El Amor y La Muerte, Love and Death by Granados with a change in choreographic style. The late Romanticism of Granados might have jarred after the Shostakovich, but in fact the music sounded almost more contemporary then what went before. It was as if the progress on the ideal journey generated joy and enthusiasm in the quest, and this despite the strange foreboding that characterizes this piece, which perhaps signified some of the dangers that had to be overcome on the way.

Another piano progress took the instrument to just right of center stage. Our dancer was probably exhausted by now and spent much of the next piece lying motionless on the floor. It was apposite because the piece was Shadow by Rebecca Saunders. We were perhaps at the point in the journey where the endpoint seems to have receded and all experience seems to oppress, to oppose, to turn to nothing. The music repeatedly pounded our potential hero into the ground, and he was left alone.

The piano progressed again to the right edge of the stage. And the final piece was a neoclassical-cum-minimalist celebration of rhythm, David del Puerto’s Danza. It was the achievement of the goal, the end of the journey, but unreflective in its elation, its apparent rhythmic progress leading eventually to precisely nowhere. Nowhere, that is, except a return to the realization that whatever goal we set ourselves, we begin as an individual and complete our task as that same individual, still vulnerable, still putting out those four tones on our bare chest, DSCH, me, just me. Nothing more. What a superbly thought out and presented experience this was.

That was Saturday evening and, at lunchtime on Sunday, we were two rows back in the same hall at ADDA in Alicante for a performance by Ars Musicandum, a saxophone quartet. What was intriguing about this concert was its presentation of a programme of music by composers who were all from the same small town, Rafal, population 4500, south of Alicante.

We began with a Romantic Quartet by Agustin Bertomeu, born 1928. Written in a pre-dominantly neo-classical style, it mixed rhythmic exploration and clear lines with occasional harmonic clashes.

Next was Subreptos by Sixto Herrero, who is the soprano player and spokesperson for the band. This was a piece written in neo-primitive style, where line and harmony were not the goals. The four saxophones visited the droning horns of Tibetan temple music, the sung-through mumbling of Australian didgeridoos, the sounds and occasionally timeless meandering of the Japanese flute. I am sure there were more influences as well. Overall, the primitivism reminded us of how foreign and utterly strange this imagined, but still utterly human sound world now seems to ears trained to expect tonality, rhythm and form.

The third piece was AL-LA by Jesus Mula, another composer from Rafal and the final piece by Sixto Herrero was Aonides del Viento. There was cultural deconstruction, popular themes and Bach-like chorales, even a fugue of sorts, becoming fractured and jagged.

Overall Ars Musicandum presented a sophisticated, complex musical argument that was communicated lucidly and expertly by the quartet. There were two encores, both arrangements by Sixto Herrero and the group received rapturous applause for the brilliant performance.

It’s been a long time. But what a comeback!