Commedia per musica in four acts. Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte based on Le mariage de Figaro ou La folle journée (1784) by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. First performed on 1 May 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna. First performed at the Gran Teatre del Liceu on 2 February 1916.

Le nozze di Figaro has a distinctly pre-Revolutionary flavour.  But over and above its ideological aspects and brilliant social satire — which needed the blessing of Emperor Joseph II, the illustrated despot par excellence —, Da Ponte and Mozart created a matchless allegory of the quest for happiness. All the leading figures yearn for love, in one form or another: sexual desire (the Count and Cherubino), nostalgia for lost happiness (the Countess), or loving family ties (Figaro and Susanna). In each case, however, love is menaced from the outset by mistrust and betrayal. Da Ponte defined this opera as a commedia per musica, not an opera buffa, and indeed both the text and music go well beyond the usual stereotypes. The characters are endowed with unprecedented psychological depth, while the score includes many features from opera seria, among them the arias, which express a sadness far-removed from the comic tradition. 

This initiation to opera, created by the company Comediants, comprises excerpts from the great operas of the repertoire, linked together by a surprising and highly amusing plot. 

Excerpts from operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Henry Purcell, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi, Georges Bizet and Giacomo Puccini.
NOTICE

We inform you Allegro Vivace performance on 4th february has been cancelled.
The price of the places purchased by ServiCaixa, telephone, internet or ticket office will be returned directly to the cards used to make the purchase. 
The theatre will contact the remaining people so that they can let us know into which current account the deposit should be made. 
For more information: tel. 93 485 99 13

Dramma giocoso in two acts. Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on Carlo Goldoni's Le bourru bienfaisant. Music by Vicent Martín i Soler. First performed on 4 January 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna. 
First performance at the Gran Teatre del Liceu.

This is the first staging at the Gran Teatre del Liceu of Il burbero di buon core (The Good-hearted Curmudgeon), a dramma giocoso by the composer from Valencia Vicent Martín i Soler. The libretto, by the famous Lorenzo Da Ponte, is based on Le bourru bienfaisant (1771), a play written in French by Goldoni. Of the three opere buffe Martín i Soler wrote in Vienna, all in partnership with Da Ponte, this was the first. The others are Una cosa rara ossia bellezza ed onesta (also in1786) and L’arbore di Diana (1787). Martín i Soler embarked on his brilliant career in Naples. He spent several periods at court in Madrid and settled in Vienna in the 1780s. From there was summoned by Catherine II to Saint Petersburg, where he died in 1806. Il burbero di buon cuore was premiered the same year as Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. When both works were revived in Vienna three years later, Mozart wrote new arias for them and the two arias he added to Il burbero have remained in the score. It is a typical comedy of character, tinged with the pathos and sentimentality of the new bourgeois drama. 

- IMAGES OF REHEARSALS

This initiation to opera, created by the company Comediants, comprises excerpts from the great operas of the repertoire, linked together by a surprising and highly amusing plot.

Excerpts from operas by Monteverdi, Purcell, Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Berlioz, Verdi, Bizet and Puccini.

Works by Robert Schumann, Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf.

SWAN LAKE

Swan Lake (1877), by Pyotr  I. Tchaikovsky, the first ballet score ever written by a symphonic composer, meant a qualitative leap forward for dance. But it was not until Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov's definitive revision (1895) of the original choreography  that the work became a byword for the great Russian school and, by extension, classical ballet in general.  Though attempts have been made in the course of its long history to update the Romantic plot — based on traditional Russian folktales —, Petipa's masterly version has withstood the onslaughts of modernity and the ethereal perfection of his achievement has been upheld. This adaptation by the Corella Ballet, under its director Ángel Corella, maintains the timeless spirit of the choreography, while viewing the dramaturgy through a present-day prism by enhancing the beauty of the movements. Thus it combines the purity of the classical dance tradition with a dramatic idiom akin to 21st century audiences, striking a subtle balance between classicism and novelty in order to recreate the fantasy, magic and beauty of an unquestionable classic in the light of present-day tastes. 


Music
Piotr I. Tchaikovsky

Choreography
Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov 
(revised by Ángel Corella)

Scenery and costumes
Benjamin Tyrrell

Lighting
Ángel Corella i Luis Perdiguero

Symphony Orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu

Conductor
Aleksei Baklan



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Commedia lirica in four acts. Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henry Murger (1845-1848). Music by Giacomo Puccini. First performed on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin. 
First performed at the Gran Teatre del Liceu on 10 April 1898.

From the mid-19th century onwards — against the background of industrialization, the supremacy of bourgeois values, and an intellectual climate dominated by secular materialistic and scientific positivism — art became realistic, seeking to show things as they really were — almost photographically —, rather than making them more amiable or more beautiful. An opera such as La Bohème, which talks of the fragile nature of happiness in a world of poverty, cold and disease, is an obvious example of this trend.

In La Bohème, however, the aesthetic of Verism — the Italian equivalent of the French Naturalism of Émile Zola — becomes more sentimental and the brutality of social reality is depicted less crudely than elsewhere. Four young artists live out their everyday lives amid dreams and disappointments, waiting for the event that is to win them renown, but poverty and misfortune deprive the leading characters — Mimì and Rodolfo — of the joy of mutual love. The text and music relate all this with a pleasant melodramatic tenderness with which it is easy to identify.