Schwabacher Summer Concert Details Announced

Regular readers probably know by now that, in a little less than a month’s time, the Merola Opera Program will present two performances of the Schwabacher Summer Concert. This is an annual event structured around staged scenes. This year the production will consist of extended performances of four selections, each drawing upon an opera by a Latin American or Spanish composer. Specifics are as follows:

1. The Spanish composer Manuel de Falla will be represented with selections from his two-act opera La vida breve (life is short). The librettist was Carlos Fernández-Shaw, who drew upon the Andalusian dialect. While the opera won first prize in a Spanish competition in 1905, Falla could not get the opera produced until he took it to France, where it was first performed (with a French translation of the libretto by Paul Millet) in Nice on April 1, 1913. The complete opera is only about an hour long, but it tends to be best known for instrumental excerpts.
2. Florencia en el Amazonas (Florence in the Amazon), by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán working with librettist Marcela Fuentes-Berain, was jointly commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, and the Seattle Opera. This made it the first Spanish-language opera to be commissioned by a major American opera company. The libretto was based on characters in the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. Scenes from the second act of this opera will be performed.
3. The third source of excerpts will be the three-act Spanish zarzuela Doña Francisquita, composed in 1923 by Amadeo Vives. The libretto was provided by Federica Romero and Guillermo Fernández-Shaw, based on the play La discreta enamorada (the ingenious lover) by Lope de Vega.
4. The program will conclude with selections from Ainadamar (fountain of tears), the first opera by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov. The title of the opera is an Arabic word. David Henry Hwang provided a Spanish-language libretto. The plot involves the relationship between Federico García Lorca and his lover and muse, Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu. The music was scored almost entirely for female voices.

These selections will all be staged by Jose Maria Condemi, currently the Carol Franc Buck Distinguished Chair and the Director of Opera and Musical Theater at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). The conductor will be Jorge Parodi, General and Artistic Director of Opera Hispánica.

As has already been announced, the two performances will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 14, and at 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 16. Ticket prices will be $80 and $55. San Francisco Opera has created a single event page from which tickets for both performances can be purchased.