Xavier Sabata lives in an ash garden in Peralada

The Peralada Festival continues its summer programming with the absolute premiere of Genius loci, A modern and daring proposal created by stage director Rafael R. Villalobos and countertenor Xavier Sabata. The show, conceived as a kind of dramatized recital, halfway between performance and installation, transforms the garden into a space for abstract meditation on existential doubts and human crises. Without any excessively narrative pretensions, Sabata combines the performance of nine musical fragments with the recitation of texts in Spanish inspired by the book The garden loses [The Lost Garden] by Jorn de Précy, accompanied by Jonas Nordberg on the archlute, who also acts as an actor, and Liam Byrne, on the viola da gamba and electronics.

Rafael R. Villalobos, recognized for groundbreaking productions such as controversy Tosca from the High School two years agoTogether with visual artist Cachito Vallés, he creates a garden that is completely removed from the exuberant image of green plants or an Adamic paradise. The performers wander through a landscape of black gravel, trees formed from fluorescent tubes, industrial structures, and gardening tools, in a symbolic, dehumanized, almost apocalyptic setting that evokes the entelechy of a garden that no longer exists.

From there, Sabata leads the way as a singer-actor, starring in five thematic scenes with musical pieces from different eras, styles, and composers—albeit, all of them English, from the Renaissance John Dowland to the Autumn-Romanesque nationalism of Ralph Vaughan Williams or Benjamin Britten, more than a few of them powerful in the show. As a soloist, Sabata shows off his best talents: a clear, crisp, restrained, and unforced voice, even a touch fragile and cracked, yet extremely genuine and communicative, with a beautiful timbre, expressive phrasing, and admirable control of air that allows him to sing in motion.

The Catalan countertenor, however, not only played the soloist, but, amid the almost ritualistic concatenation of the pieces, also took the floor as an actor. And it's in these more theatrical moments that the performance lost its strength, as, despite Sabata's dominance of the scene and his efforts to perform, the declamation seemed hesitant and excessively strained, especially when the lute player joined in. Therefore, the work, as a whole, isn't entirely complete and has some work to do, but it certainly offers a sensorial journey full of stimulating ideas that bring together music, theater, and thought.