The world premiere of “Penelope’s Dream”, a chamber opera by Pedro Halffter, will close tomorrow the seventh edition of the Festival Música en Villafranca.
The world premiere of Penelope’s Dream by the composer Pedro Halffter (Madrid, 1971), a chamber opera for soprano and two pianos, will close tomorrow, Saturday 26 August, the seventh edition of the Festival Música en Villafranca, which has been held in Villafranca del Bierzo since 2017. The concert will take place at 20:00 in the church of San Nicolás el Real in the town of Villafranca del Bierzo.
Penelope’s Dream is written and composed entirely by Pedro Halffter, although inspired, according to its author, by Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses. “I am a great admirer of Joyce and I have given lectures on him in Trieste, the city where a summer school on Joyce is being held, because it was there that he wrote the first three chapters of Ulysses, and Penelope’s Dream has, musically, characteristics of Ulysses. Just as in Joyce’s work each chapter is written in a different way, and some seem to be written like newspaper headlines, others as if a notary were speaking, others as if it were a romance novel or Molly Bloom’s monologue, with forty pages without any punctuation marks, in the music of Penelope’s Dream I have applied the same criteria to each scene and interlude of the opera, in order to follow Joycean style and for the music to have, it is worth the redundancy, many different styles”.
The only character in Penelope’s Dream – whose text is originally written in English – is played by the American soprano Ashley Bell, accompanied on piano by Pedro Halffter himself and Itziar Barredo, all conducted by Antón Armendáriz. Bell was already in charge last year of the premiere in Villafranca del Bierzo of Klara, another chamber opera for voice and two pianos by Pedro Hallfter -inspired by Klara and the Sun, the novel by Japanese Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro-, whose complete orchestral version was performed this year on 29 July in Música en Villafranca. “Klara and Penelope’s Dream are not complementary works, but I do think they complement each other very well,” explains Halffter. I hope that these two works will have a long future. That’s what we’re working on at the moment. Obviously, Klara has been in development for longer and we are thinking of making a big recording later on, to be released on DVD when it is more developed”.
Before the end of the festival, tonight will also see the premiere of Pedro Halffter’s version for two pianos, soprano and baritone of the Lyrische Symphonie by the Austrian composer and conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky, a work which this year marks the centenary of its premiere.
The festival Música en Villafranca was promoted by the Spanish composer and conductor himself, as a tribute to his mother, the pianist María Manuela Caro y Carbajal, known as Marita Caro, born in Villafranca del Bierzo in 1932 and who died on 18 December 2017. The festival is inspired, as Halffter explained when announcing its creation, by French festivals. “Villafranca is a small town, but I think it has a lot of possibilities. Firstly, because El Bierzo is an undiscovered region, comparable to Tuscany in Italy. Also because it is one of the most important places on the Camino de Santiago, with the church of Santiago Apóstol [whose access through the Puerta del Perdón is the only one that guarantees the plenary indulgence of the Route, apart from the Obradoiro], and the most important personalities have passed through here. And, equally, for the space where the recitals will be held, the Church of San Nicolás el Real, which is located in the heart of Villafranca and which provides an ideal location for the piano”.