“Not a polemic,” declares the character of Federico Garcia Lorca. You could have fooled me, for Welsh National Opera’s turn with Ainadamar, first seen in the UK last year when Scottish Opera unveiled this spectacular co-production, is littered with portentous utterances by the Spanish playwright that are plastered onto our eyeballs by Tal Rosner’s hyperactive projections. But what of the opera itself?
For context and clarity it would be hard to improve on David Smythe’s excellent review from Glasgow. As he noted of Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s score, “(it) ranges from pulsing flamenco rhythms to a relaxed Cuban rumba, conjuring dreamy passages in between with unusual orchestral colours and electronic samples.” Now it’s back, substantially recast and relocated to WNO’s tour itinerary but otherwise intact and mightily entertaining. Do read his whole article; I shan’t re-rehearse it here.
That word ‘entertaining’ is peculiar (not a million miles from ‘guilty pleasure’) when it’s applied to a weighty chronicle of fascist repression and assassination, but there it is. The title Ainadamar means “fountain of tears” and derives from a mountain spring where the playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was executed for disseminating liberal ideas during the Spanish Civil War. However, the work’s political content is leavened not only by Golijov’s alluring music but also by a dazzling production by Brazilian director-choreographer Deborah Colker that saturates the Millennium Centre stage in irresistible energy and glorious Technicolor.
The presentation is simple but devilishly versatile and ideally conceived for touring to a range of venues. Colker's stage is dominated by a high central cylinder made of spaghetti-string curtaining and designed to receive three-dimensional projections (Rosner) and lighting states (Paul Keogan) as well as providing a conceal-reveal facility for scenic changes – all of which lends a marvellous fluidity to Jon Bausor’s semi-abstract designs.
In and around this translucent edifice, Colker’s approach to dramatic action is to supply non-stop eye candy. She gives us beautiful people, exquisite costumes and a style of movement direction that’s pretty much ‘Cirque du Stomp’. Ah, but whither the plot? Were there murders in the building? Death is constantly alluded to and discussed in a patchwork of illuminated quotations that really belong in a programme note, if anywhere, but maybe Golijov and his librettist (David Henry Hwang’s credit is tucked away deep inside WNO’s literature) decided that a visual enactment of Lorca’s killing would have soured the show.
Lorca himself is very much a third party at his own shindig, more talked about than talking, and present only to enact himself in remembrances by the singer Margarita Xirgu (Jaquelina Livieri) and her student Nuria (Julieth Lozano Rolong). In a possible nod to Der Rosenkavalier, the male character in this central trio is played en travesti by the mezzo-soprano Hanna Hipp, herself a distinguished Octavian in Strauss’ opera. There, though, the similarities end, for here she is no lovelorn 17-year-old but Lorca himself.
Alongside these outstanding principals, this latest incarnation of Ainadamar is featherbedded by the musical brilliance of the WNO Chorus and Orchestra under Matthew Kofi Waldren, and by a supporting cast of unimpeachable quality. Naturally enough, since this is a hard-nosed rage against the machine of despotic tyranny, there are glittering flamenco dancers and a strutting bullfighter (Isaac Tovar) to keep everyone smiling. “Are you not entertained?” as the gladiator Maximus once asked. Yes, very much so. Something important is lost amid the fun, though.
