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El director teatral gallego estrenará próximamente en Londres Un `Don Giovanni´ joven, chulo y violento, La ópera del compositor clásico austríaco Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "Don Giovanni" se transforma en manos del director teatral gallego Calixto Bieito en la historia de un sexo-adicto en un ambiente de violencia y droga, en el que muchos jóvenes se ven inmersos durante los fines de semana. Bieito escapa del mito del Don Juan para adentrarse en el vacío en el que sobrevive parte de la juventud. El director gallego estrenará tal versión del "Don Giovanni" el día 31 de mayo en la English National Opera de Londres, en coproducción con el Liceo de Barcelona. Bieito sitúa la acción en el sábado noche de una zona de bares y discotecas. "Cuento un aspecto concreto de la obra, el de la gente que vive al límite. Mi Don Juan no resulta ser un vil seductor de mujeres, sino, más bien, un joven guapo y ingenuo, con carisma, violento y adicto al sexo que, al igual que otros muchos jóvenes, dedica el fin de semana a evadirse e inhibirse del mundo en un círculo de alcohol y drogas". En Londres ya la han llegado a comparar con la atmósfera de la novela (y posterior versión cinematográfica) de Irvine Welsh "Trainspotting". Después de estrenar en el Liceo de Barcelona, el pasado mes de diciembre, una polémica versión de "Un ballo in maschera" del compositor italiano Giuseppe Verdi, Calixto Bieito ha subido considerables enteros en su cotización como director de escena para la ópera. Este controvertido hombre de teatro se ha comprometido ya en diversos teatros europeos a realizar títulos como "Il Trovatore", "La Traviata" y "Don Carlo" de Verdi, "El murciélago" de Johann Strauss, "La Bohème" de Puccini, etc. | |
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CORRIERE DELLA SERA Musica: LONDRA, 1 GIU - Fischi e contestazioni per il 'Don Giovanni' di Mozart messo in scena dall'English National Opera di Londra: al pubblico non e' piaciuta l'interpretazione in chiave moderna che vede il protagonista fare ampio uso di cocaina e svagarsi con orgie e atti indecenti. L'allestimento e' stato pensato da Calixto Bieito, gia' direttore artistico del Teatre Romea di Barcellona, che ha prodotto un Don Giovanni sado-maso alquanto inedito. Niente champagne per il farfallone mozartiano: al suo posto, un cocktail di superalcolici e droga. Il sesso ovunque e in ogni salsa: anche sui sedili posteriori di un'automobile. Non sono mancati, inoltre, parolacce e termini scurrili, un'aggiunta al libretto resa possibile dall'abitudine dell'English National Opera di tradurre i testi in inglese. Quando Bieito e' salito sul palcoscenico per l'inchino assieme agli interpreti, una grossa parte del pubblico ha espresso il suo malumore con grida, fischi e schiamazzi. ''Questa e' un'opera estremamente sofisticata - si e' sfogato Michael Selingman, uno dei 2.000 paganti - che e' stata trasformata in uno spettacolo terribilmente esplicito e di pessimo gusto''. Richard Mersey ha raccontato di aver trascorso l'intera serata ad ascoltare la musica con gli occhi chiusi. ''Mozart - ha detto al 'Times' - e' stato trattato come un compositore di seconda categoria che ha bisogno di qualcosa in piu' per essere interessante''. A qualcuno, pero', e' piacuto. Secondo Camilla Bryant, un'imprenditrice, ''Bieito e' il Quentin Tarantino della lirica. Il suo Don Giovanni sarebbe piaciuto molto a Mozart''. | |
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Sex, booze, drugs and Mozart Last year he treated Edinburgh to masturbating priests; now he's setting Don Giovanni amid the hedonists and pill-poppers of modern Barcelona. Director Calixto Bieito talks to Michael Billington The Spanish director Calixto Bieito has a knack of stirring things up. At Edinburgh last year his production of Ramon del Valle-Inclan's play the Barbaric Comedies, with its image of a pervy priest masturbating over a female skeleton, led to a rash of silly-season headlines (the Telegraph temperately called it "a paradigm or parody of everything that is wrong and rotten about the Edinburgh international festival") and some walkouts. And Bieito himself admits that his first opera production - of Haydn's Il Mondo Della Luna - caused mayhem in Maastricht in 1999; largely because he set this satire on Enlightenment omniscience in a Moulin Rouge-type cabaret. Something tells me that his new version of Mozart's Don Giovanni for English National Opera, which opens tomorrow, will not exactly pass unnoticed. In person Bieito turns out to be a volatile, balding bundle of hyperactivity. Unlike many directors, he carries the opera score around with him, and makes constant reference to it in the course of an animated discussion. Indeed Bieito, born in northern Spain's Miranda de Ebro in 1963 but bred in Barcelona, comes from a musically gifted family. For a short time he was a conservatory student. "I was pianist," he says, "but gave it up because I felt I was so crap." As a relative newcomer to opera - though he has directed Un ballo in Maschera in Barcelona and Cosi Fan Tutte in Cardiff - Bieito approaches Don Giovanni with a fresh eye. "I love the film version by Joseph Losey," he says, "but I can't do that because it is not my world. I start with the score and I listen to the music to find the soul of the piece. What I find is the nihilism of the modern world. So I've set the action in the Olympic Port in today's Barcelona. It becomes a production about young people in their 30s trying to have fun: people drinking, pill-popping, making love and even killing in their attempt to escape from normal life." Bieito makes constant reference to cinema in describing the hedonistic nihilism he is seeking to evoke: to Almodovar, Kubrick, Bunuel and a recent Spanish hit, Iglesias's The Day of the Beast, in which a group of young people have diabolical hallucinations. But does the feverish ecstasy of Barcelona fit the world of Mozart and da Ponte? Can Bieito's vision work with the opera's story, which involves a fight to the death between Don Giovanni and the Commendatore in the opening scene, and a statue of the Commendatore coming alive in the last to consign the antihero to the flames of hell? Not for nothing is the work's alternative title Il Dissoluto Punito - The Rake Punished. For Bieito the story makes absolute sense in modern terms. "The Commendatore," he says, "is a violent man who runs his own cocktail bar and is going to fight with this fucking Don Giovanni because he has tried to seduce his daughter: it's the kind of fight you can find every weekend in the cities of Europe. And, at the end, the Commendatore becomes a drug-induced vision. We no longer believe in the idea of statues dragging people down to hell. In our version it is the so-called 'good' people who kill Don Giovanni. I believe it's all there in Mozart. 'Questo e il fin di chi fa mal' - 'sinners end as they begin' - sing the ensemble, and in goes the knife. The conductor, Joseph Swenson, says it's the first time he's really understood the music at the end." As staff director Michael Walling says in a programme note for Bieito's production, the death of Giovanni here becomes "a destruction of the life-force in the self", a purgation of a level of experience and truth the world cannot bear to face. But, however controversial Bieito's version may prove, no one can deny that it's based on close attention to the music and a clear-sighted view of character. "If you follow the score," says Bieito, "it tells you exactly where the work changes from comedy to tragedy. A modern setting also defines the people. Leporello is not so much Giovanni's servant as the best friend you both love and hate - they did military service together and Leporello is now the kind of working-class taxi driver who has a football season ticket at Nou Camp. And Donna Elvira is a modern girl who went totally crazy when Giovanni left her, spent three months on the sofa eating, and is destroyed by passion like the heroine of Fatal Attraction. The singers understand the references. I have a perfect young cast for the version I want to do." Bieito clearly sees the opera as a study of a secularised, self- destructive society rather than a sacred morality tale. Yet, as he describes his background, he reveals the Spanish agnostic's preoccupation with religion. He reveres the work of Bunuel, whose whole filmography he knows intimately. And, significantly, he was educated by Jesuits before going on to study Spanish and Catalan literature at university. His brilliant production of Calderon's Life Is a Dream, seen at Edinburgh in 1998, as well his noisily anticlerical Barbaric Comedies suggest to me he has never escaped his Jesuit beginnings. Today Bieito has an enviable life. He spends part of his year in Barcelona as artistic director of the progressive Teatre Romea, where he directs both classics and new Catalan plays. But he is also a freelance, shortly off to Salzburg to direct Shakespeare's Macbeth, and has productions of Die Fledermaus and La Bohème lined up for Welsh National Opera as well as a new Il Trovatore for Hanover. And, as a passionate movie-lover, he's keen to get going on a projected film version of Life Is a Dream. Bieito certainly crackles with energy and ideas; he is also totally committed to his singers, led by Garry Magee as Giovanni. "The cast," he says, "is amazing. In Britain I find the singers are fantastic actors, who try to make real musical theatre. This is not always the case in Italy or Spain." How well they have succeeded in putting a new spin on this most elusive and open of all operatic myths we shall know shortly. Given Bieito's track-record, I'd stand by for fireworks. • Don Giovanni is in rep at the Coliseum, London WC2 (020-7632 8300), from tomorrow until July 6. | |
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Director booed after Ibizan 'Don Giovanni' By Ian Irvine, Arts Editor The singers at the London Coliseum received loud applause and cheers, but booing broke out last night when Calixto Bieito, the Catalan theatre director, took the stage at the end of his new production of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. But the disapproval also prompted a dozen or so audience members to their feet to deliver a standing ovation for what had certainly been an unusual evening. Regular patrons of the adventurous work of the English National Opera company have come to take full-frontal nudity and Nazis-with-everything in their stride, but many were obviously startled by the transformation of one of Mozart's greatest operas. The traditional setting is 17th-century Seville and the opera tells the story of the life and crimes of a dissolute nobleman who is finally dragged down to hell, unrepentant, by the ghost of the Commendatore, a man he murders at the work's opening after trying to rape his daughter. Last night we were certainly still in Spain but contemporary Ibiza was a more likely scene as the characters, now a leery bunch of Essex girls and lager louts, moved through bars and clubs drinking continuously and snorting cocaine for occasional diversion. Instead of the usual final exit through a flaming trapdoor, the Don was bound and gagged to a chair and à la Murder on the Orient Express, knifed by each of his victims in turn. This certainly brought a convincing unsupernatural close to the piece, but the danger of the Don's lust for life to ordered society was less easy to see as the entire cast of normally upright characters shared his predilection for constant alcoholic and chemical oblivion and his unrelenting sex drive. Calixto Bieito is no stranger to controversy. Last year the artistic director of the Teatro Romea in Barcelona brought his four-and-a-half-hour production of the Barbaric Comedies to the Edinburgh Festival, which received very mixed notices and several walkouts for its extremity. During rehearsals for the opera Bieito frequently remarked that he was not really interested in recreating the myth of Don Juan, but only in allowing the character of Giovanni to live for a contemporary audience. Assistant director Michael Walling said: "Our references have been primarily cinematic: Scorsese, Kubrick, Almodovar. "Garry Magee [who plays the Don] brings the energy of a film star or a footballer to Giovanni. It's a way of demonstrating how these events could happen. It's being reinvented once again, and it won't be the last time." | |
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Nuevo controvertido estreno operístico de Calixto Bieito Escándalo en torno a la inusual puesta en escena Una nueva producción de la ópera "Don Giovanni" de Mozart presentada por el director teatral Calixto Bieito encontró una variada reacción cuando se estrenó en el Coliseum de Londres la semana pasada. Los cantantes recibieron un fuerte y unánime aplauso, pero un abucheo general llenó la sala cuando Bieito subió al escenario. No obstante, la desaprobación incitó a más de un docena de miembros del público a crecerse y ovacionar de pie al escenógrafo español. Los patrones de la Ópera Nacional Inglesa no son extraños a encontrarse sobre el escenario actores desnudos y personajes nazis. Pero esta producción parecía ir más allá, portando la conocida historia de "Don Giovanni" a la contemporánea Ibiza, con los personajes adquiriendo la forma de bebedores de cerveza y de muchachas de Essex yendo de bar en bar y "esnifando" cocaína. En lugar de la usual salida a través de una trampilla ardiente o con humo (el descenso a los infiernos del final), Don Giovanni fue atado a una silla y apuñalado por cada una de sus víctimas. Calixto Bieito ya se ha codeado anteriormente con la controversia. El año pasado llevó al Festival de Edimburgo una producción de las "Comedias Bárbaras" en la que aparecían sacerdotes en actitudes obscenas. Durante los ensayos del "Don Giovanni", Bieito declaró que no estaba interesado en recrear el mito de Don Juan, sino sólo dejar vivir al personaje. Este director teatral español hace referencia constante al cine, describiendo lo que intenta lograr: igualar a Pedro Almodóvar, Stanley Kubrick y Luis Buñuel. "Don Giovanni" de Mozart sigue representándose en el Coliseum de Londres hasta el 6 de julio. | |
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Londres abuchea al director en el estreno de su última producción Calixto Bieito presenta un "Don Giovanni" IRENE HDEZ. VELASCO . CorresponsalLONDRES.- Calixto Bieito ya está habituado a levantar a su paso un reguero de críticas y polémicas. Y, siguiendo la costumbre, con su última producción la ha vuelto a liar. Bieito estrenó la noche del jueves en el London Coliseum su particular versión de Don Giovanni, la conocida ópera de Mozart. Y aunque los cantantes recibieron por parte del público una cerrada ovación, el respetable se lanzó a abuchear a Calixto Bieito en el mismo instante en que éste se atrevió a poner el pie sobre el escenario del teatro. Aunque, en honor a la verdad, también hay que decir que alrededor de una docena de espectadores aplaudieron encendidamente la puesta en escena. Estaba cantado que el último trabajo de Calixto Bieito no iba a pasar desapercibido. La producción que el director del Teatro Romea de Barcelona ha realizado de Don Giovanni para la English National Opera es toda una osadía. El libreto de la ópera original sitúa la acción en la Sevilla del siglo XVII y narra la vida del desenfrenado y licencioso don Giovanni, un don Juan seductor y egoísta que acaba siendo arrastrado al infierno por el fantasma del Commendatore, a quien previamente había asesinado después de intentar violar a su hija. En la producción de Bieito, sin embargo, la acción transcurre en la Barcelona de hoy en día y la protagonizan un puñado de jóvenes que viven de noche y se dedican a ir de bar en bar bebiendo sin descanso, metiéndose rayas de coca, pastillas de éxtasis y acostándose los unos con los otros. Incluso el final de la ópera es otro muy distinto: en vez de terminar don Giovanni devorado por las llamas del averno, acaba atado a una silla y, en plan Asesinato en el Orient Express, recibiendo una puñalada de cada una de sus víctimas. Calixto Bieito argumenta que el espíritu de Mozart se encuentra detrás de ésta su última producción. "Comencé con la partitura, escuchando la música para encontrar el alma de la pieza. Y lo que encontré fue el nihilismo del mundo actual. Así que situé la acción en el Puerto Olímpico de la Barcelona de hoy. Y se convirtió en una producción sobre gente joven de treinta y tantos que trata de pasárselo bien: gente que bebe, que se mete pastillas, que hace el amor y que incluso comete asesinatos en un intento por escapar de su vida normal", declaraba hace unos días Calixto Bieito al diario británico The Guardian. "Pastilleros" Aunque a muchos de los espectadores que el jueves acudieron al estreno de este Don Giovanni les parece un sacrilegio trasladar esta ópera a los after hours de Barcelona y convertir a sus personajes en pastilleros, a Bieito le parece perfectamente adecuado. "El Commendatore", dice, "es un tipo violento que dirige su propio bar de copas y que tiene una pelea con el cabrón de don Giovanni porque éste ha tratado de seducir a su hija. Es el tipo de pelea que uno puede encontrarse cualquier fin de semana en cualquier ciudad de Europa. Y, al final, el commendadore se convierte en una alucinación producto de las drogas, porque ya no hay quien se crea que hay estatuas que arrastran a la gente al infierno. En nuestra versión son las supuestas buenas personas las que matan a don Giovanni. Y creo que todo esto está en Mozart". Lo cierto es que la polémica generada a raíz de Don Giovanni no ha cogido a Bieito desprevenido. El año pasado la producción que presentó en el Festival de Edimburgo de Las Comedias Bárbaras de Valle-Inclán, con aquella famosa escena en la que se veía a un cura masturbándose sobre el cadáver de una mujer, ya le valió críticas furibundas. Y, en 1999, su versión de la ópera de Haydn Il Mondo della Luna dio lugar a encendidas diatribas, en buena parte por el "atrevimiento" de Bietio de situar esta sátira sobre la Ilustración en un cabaré al estilo Moulin Rouge. | |
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Opera Japonica Letter from London By Ruth Elleson's (...) Mozart was also on offer down the road at the Coliseum, with Calixto Bieito' s new production of Don Giovanni causing a great stir amongst the critics for all the wrong reasons. Bieito's vision of the opera's world is contemporary and entirely amoral, and attracted boos from its first-night audience for its depiction of casual sex, violence and drug abuse. Prior to opening night, Bieito had declared his intention to bring the piece to life for a modern audience, without any real regard for the 'myth of Don Giovanni' - but to create a world where all the men are violent junkies and all the women are nymphomaniacs is to take a very cynical, some would say insulting, view of contemporary life. Coupled with Joseph Swenson's breakneck-speed conducting, even the fine and committed cast could not raise critical opinion of the new staging. (...) | |
