Jordi Savall rides on Gluck's expressive freedom

Barcelona"Every leg we have in Toulouse will see it on stage," promises Beate Vollack, director of the Ballet of the Opéra du Capitole de Toulouse. The company, with 35 dancers, will perform two original choreographies about two symbols of freedom without corsets, the Don Juan and the Semiramis, with music by Christoph Willibald von Gluck performed by Le Concert des Nations under the direction of maestro Jordi Savall. The show can be seen from March 23 to 29 at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, included for the first time in the Dansa Metropolitana festival.

"Gluck is one of the essential composers of the transition from Baroque to Classicism. He was the one who best understood the change represented by his time, inspired by the Enlightenment, the desire for freedom, modernity, and more authentic expression," highlights Jordi Savall. As the German composer had studied in Italy, he mastered operatic composition, but his style "beyond the conventions of the time" earned him "severe, brutal criticism for its hermeticism, for modern harmonies that the public did not understand, because they considered them outside the norms," explains Savall.

In his desire to break with the baroque overload and to search for new ways of expressing himself, in 1761 he presented in Vienna a Don Juan with a pantomime ballet. There's no trace of that project in the history of dance, but what remains is "a music that isn't narrative, but rather gives complete creative freedom to the choreographer," notes the director of the Toulouse Ballet, where this three-part co-production with the Liceu and the National Theatre of Opéra-Comique premiered.

A Modern-Day 'Don Juan'

The evening unites Gluck's two pieces for the first time, and does so with two choreographies that offer "different approaches and languages, but which complement each other," says Vollack. Romanian choreographer Edward Clug is behind the staging of the Don Juan. Clug, dazzled by "the legend of Spanish origin about the gentleman who has a knack for women," by the text Molière initially wrote, and also by fortuitous coincidences such as the phonetic similarity of his surname to Gluck, decided to accept the challenge. "From the beginning, I understood I had a problem on the table, and that is that music is very beautiful, but not necessarily inspiring, when you think about Molière's work. And I knew that the way it was designed at the time, it wouldn't work with today's audiences," he explains.

His approach was to leave aside abstraction and construct a story "from intuition," based on the power of myth: he makes the three main characters dance, the people (with a company that acts from the heart), and the statue of the Commander on stage. "There is an intense drama that culminates in a very spectacular finale, when the Commander makes hell open and the Furies take Don Juan away. It is one of the most expressive scenes that had been composed up to that moment and I am sure that Mozart knew what his debauched and libertine self would later do."

The Spaniard Ángel Rodríguez has choreographed Semiramis, a Greek drama in which the protagonist murders her husband and seeks a new lover who turns out to be his son. The choreographer has imagined an empowered woman and placed her in front of an impressive eighteen-meter curtain "that could be exhibited at the Guggenheim," says the choreographer. "You can imagine the enormous tension and dramatic force of the work," exclaims Savall, who celebrates the possibility of "feeling this music with a visual complement that goes to the heart, through the beauty of the movements and the expression offered by dance," he says.

The program will begin with "a very high-class appetizer that shows the quality of Gluck's compositional style," says the maestro, such as the orchestral suite ofIphigenia at Aulis (1774), a work that will begin the path towards the fusion of music and dance, Gluck and Savall.