Newspaper Article

MUSIC REVIEW; Flawed -- and filled with magic; The poetic power of Osvaldo Golijov helps smooth the wrinkles in 'Ainadamar,' about the death of poet Federico Garcia Lorca

Swed, Mark

2004

Overview

The saga of \"Ainadamar\" began with [Osvaldo Golijov] dropping his initial idea for a Holocaust opera told through the eyes of grieving women and turning to [Federico Garcia Lorca] for inspiration at the last possible minute. Last spring, he talked playwright David Henry Hwang into crafting a libretto in a matter of weeks. Hwang had the further constraint of maintaining the original all-female cast. In the great operatic tradition, the Argentine-born Golijov, who translated the libretto into Spanish, composed right up to the Tanglewood premiere. In certain respects, \"Ainadamar\" is a remarkable achievement for something so quickly crafted. The short opera (in Tanglewood it was paired with another premiere, Robert Zuidam's \"Rage d'Amours\") ambitiously presents Lorca from several simultaneous points of view and time frames. His death is seen in flashback by the aging actress Margarita Xirgu, who is waiting backstage to give her final performance of Lorca's early play, \"Mariana Pineda.\" She recalls the poet and herself as a young woman, visualizes his execution and communes with his spirit as she walks on stage, where she collapses and dies. [Dawn Upshaw] is a rapt, commanding figure as the elder Margarita, as is Kelly O'Connor, a strikingly charismatic mezzo-soprano, now a graduate student at UCLA, as Lorca. Among Golijov's improvements is that he has given O'Connor a more exuberant, Lorca-like entrance. Unhappily, though, these impressive singers did not register ideally in Disney.

• Publisher: Tribune Interactive, LLC
• Subject: Ainadamar / Opera