Just occasionally – in fact pretty rarely these years – something utterly surprising emerges from an eventide in a concert hall. Almost 40 old age into an involvement in music which have focused on every style of western music from Gothic to Minimalism (perhaps not such as a great leap!), existent surprises are now quite rare and often come up about on hearing a work by a immature composer, person just starting to seek a voice. But Saint Francis Xavier Montsalvatge died aged ninety in 2002 after a lifespan longer than most as an active composer, but few outside his native Catalunya were then familiar with his music. Since moving to Kingdom Of Spain Iodine have got got actively sought programs that featured his increasingly popular end product and have been impressed with the eclectic method of his style, usually neo-classical, but often laced with popular tunes, common people song and jazz, and sometimes even giving more than than a intimation of Bartokian toughness. But nil from the pianoforte plant and pieces for twines I have got got heard up to now could have prepared me for the undergo that was Montsalvatge's opera, Elevation Gato con Botas, Cunt in Boots.
Obviously an opera for children and with a textual matter by Prince Charles Perrault which faithfully follows the familiar dumb show version of the tale, we cognize from the first rhythmical twine figures, with their shifting harmoniousnesses and equivocal keys, that we are to experience a work which bes simultaneously on different levels, similar in some ways to Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen, but lighter in its touch, a Miro to Janacek's Dadd.
The work endures just an hr and have five scenes. In the first our Cunt is lazing on a shock absorber in presence of the television, occasionally offering her skin-tight costume with its wall hanging baubles in dreamy lines to the audience. The children were captivated from first to last, mesmerised by this fantastic piquant character, elegantly and excitingly portrayed and sung by Marisa Martins. Older members of the audience might have got had other things in mind, such as is the nature of pantomime. It is in this first scene that her new sequinned, high heeled and pointed boots are presented, along with a cloak to emphasise her pinkness. The male monarch and princess lamentation the state of the kingdom. Apparently it's a deadening life when there are no warfares or civil strife. Neither are there husbands, it seems. Cunt with boots looks and is hired. The miller, a suer for the king's daughter, strips to his short pants and takes a swim in the river and immediately acquires into difficulty.
Puss bidding her trusty White coneys who, until now have got balletically moved props and rearranged the kindergarten's alphabetic furniture. They wear snorkels and goggles and deliverance the lad. The male monarch is overjoyed and the princess's eyes are seen to bump a little. And then the monster looks to unsmooth things up a bit. In his lair, he keens the fact that the high life might have got rendered his olfactory organ the coloring material of an aubergine. Cunt kinds everything out, of course, whimsically avoiding the king of beasts into which he transforms himself, then wooing the fink which is his adjacent fast one and finally, of course, dealing (offstage) with the radio-controlled orangish mouse which was the word form she requested him to take. Are all monsters that stupid? Anyway there's a wedding ceremony and clearly all unrecorded happily ever after, including Cunt who acquires her telecasting back.
So that's the story. It's pantomime, but it is superbly done and it's filled with fantastic imagery. Marisa Martins as the Cunt is quite outstanding in the role. She have a dancer's usage of the organic structure alongside coquettish looks and interpretive gestures which look to pull the music rather than follow it. And she also have that unmistakable endowment to sing beautifully and enactment apparently effortlessly at the same time. Enric Martinez-Castignani arsenic the male monarch gives an first-class portraiture of a bumbling imbecile whose deafness perhaps fells his wisdom. Miguel Zapater as the monster is outstanding. He goes a existent dumb show fictional fictional character who acknowledges he have had a few too many spectacles of wine.
Maria Luz Matrinez as the princess transports off the evident naiveté of the character with assuredness and her voice radiances in a function that have to bear the maul imagination of a wedding ceremony frock of pure achromatic hung with bright redness balls. How's that for subtlety! And if Saint David Menendez had stripped down to his swimming short pants to take his dip in the river in an older-style opera house, no uncertainty a subdivision of the audience would have got called for a recreation of the spectacles otherwise permanently trained on Pussy's pinkness. His playing of the function was a brilliant blend of buffoon and suer and his vocalizing was excellent.
But underpinning all of this was the music, which was brilliantly expressive, a deceptively simple yet eclectic premix of recitative, full orchestra and inventive ensembles. The trombone and bass horn figs that accompanied the monster were a touching of genius. The recitatives were superbly project as not quite Mozartian, whilst the neo-classicism was always delving into interesting harmonic shifts. And there was always the intimation of a cat's paw flick in the twines to let Cunt to pull us all in with that playful flick of the manus and wrist. In the cavity the World Young Person Orchestra played flawlessly and Josep Vincent, who is surely one of the brightest and most complete of immature conductors, is surely destined for planetary recognition.
This was music and public presentation of the very peak criterion – and all occurrence in this increasingly sophisticated small town of Lanthanum Nucia, just outside Benidorm. What a fantastic topographic point to live!
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