A good choice to open the Liceu season

BarcelonaThe Barcelona district of Nou Barris is no stranger to the Liceu's activity. At least once a year, the theater's orchestra offers a free concert as part of the program for the La Mercè Festival. Even more unusual is the fact that the Liceu chose a space in Nou Barris to hold a press conference. And it's by a happy coincidence. The opera that opens the 2025-2026 season is The daring fox, the wonderful work by the Czech Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), which comes with a stage proposal by the Australian Barrie Kosky, the architect of the unforgettable Magic Flute which was performed at the Liceu in 2016And in Guineueta Park there is precisely an elegant sculpture of a fox by Julià Riu Serra.

Thus, the Liceu decided that it would be there where the production that will open the opera year on September 22nd would be presented to the press, although on the 20th there will be a special performance as part of the project. Opera between generations, with admission at 35 euros. In total, there will be seven performances until September 30, all seven with a cast led by Russian soprano Elena Tsallagova (in the role of the fox), Swedish baritone Peter Mattei (the gamekeeper) and Irish mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy (the fox). Tsallagova is making her Liceu debut; Murrihy debuted in 2021 with Ariadne auf Naxos, by Strauss, and Mattei had not sung at the Rambla theatre since he did the War requiem by Britten in 2010. The cast of The cunning fox also includes David Alegret, Mireia Pinto, Anaïs Masllorens, Alejandro López, Milan Perišic and José Manuel Montero, from the Orfeó Català Children's Choir, with singers between 10 and 17 years old.

"It's a very attractive, sophisticated and accessible production," says Tsallagova about Barrie Kosky's staging, a co-production of the Liceu and the Bavarian State Opera that premiered in Munich in 2022, also starring the Russian soprano. "It's one of my favorite operas," adds Tsallagova about The cunning fox (Príhody lišky Bystroušky (in Czech), a one-hour-and-forty-minute opera that had only been programmed at the Liceu for the 2001-2002 season, in English.

A comic turned into an opera

Janáček turned this fable about life and the relationship between humans and animals into an opera after reading the comic strips published by the newspaper Lidové Noviny from Prague, which in fact adapted a 19th-century story by Bystrou Theka. "Janáček is a genius," says Josep Pons, who begins his last season as musical director of the Liceu by conducting seven performances of The cunning fox. "He's a genius of instrumentation and color, a unique figure, a composer with a great poetic sense," adds Pons, a director accustomed to the Czech composer's work, whom he places in the post-Wagenrian Romantic tradition of the early 20th century, that of national music permeated by local folklore and the local folklore of Béla Bartok and the Spanish Manuel de Falla, and with "a very rhythmically rich culture that turns it into a musical adventure, as Shostakovich did."

Buena, then, chooses to inaugurate the season, both musically and scenically, because Barrie Kosky brings his own perspective to this three-act opera performed without breaks. Andreas Weirich, the production's stockbroker in Barcelona, ​​​​explains that Kosky "eliminates naturalism, because it's not necessary to replicate nature," but rather to create a magical forest, somewhat Shakespearean, as a "symbolic framework" to develop a disturbing fable about freedom. "There are no animals with tails or faces with masks," says Weirich. "The animals and people will only be differentiated chromatically; the animals will be dressed in colors and the humans in black," adds Víctor Garcia de Gomar, artistic director of the Liceu.