ZARZUELA & OPERA
An evening of music and dance from and about Spain
conceived by Pablo Zinger.
On Saturday, October 27, 2007 at The Performing Arts Center,
Purchase College. The Harrison Friends of the Opera will present
Zarzuela & Opera, a program of music and dance from operas based
on Spanish themes and Zarzuelas, the Spanish answer to opera,
which range from serious lyrical dramas to operetta, musical
theatre and vaudeville.
The program is conceived, conducted accompanied and introduced
with spoken comments by internationally acclaimed NYC based
pianist and conductor Pablo Zinger, Musical Director of the
Patty Disney Zarzuela Series at the National Hispanic Cultural
Center in Albuquerque, NM.
Born in the 1600’s as a palatial entertainment, Zarzuela had a
long-running love-hate relationship with Italian opera, marked
by a desire to compete and resist the international dominance of
it’s powerful cousin, and at the same time a tendency to imitate
and sometimes parody it. Zarzuela composers were successively
inspired by bel canto, Verdi, verismo and Puccini.
Examples of such influences will include selections from El
Barberillo de LavapiČs, by Francisco Asenjo Barbieri (himself a
descendant of Italian performers) and El Barbero de Sevilla -a
1901 comic romp about a performance of Rossini’s Barbiere in
Burgos- alongside selections from the original.
Mr. Zinger will be joined by a group of distinguished vocalists
with ample experience in both opera and zarzuela, including
sopranos Virginia Herrera and Nell Snaidas, mezzo-sopranos Carla
LŰpez-Speziale and Mabel Ledo, tenor Luigi Boccia and David
Robinson, baritones Armando Mora and Gustavo Ahualli, plus
dancers Lola Arcedo, Natalia Alonzo Brillante, Barbara Romero
and Isabel Soler, from the classical Spanish theatrical dance
troup Danzas EspaŇolas.
The zarzuela selections will include music from the 1850’s to
the 1930’s, BretŰn’s “La verbena de la paloma”, Chueca and
Valverde’s “La gran vĚa”, Soroz·bal’s “La tabernera del puerto”
and Moreno-Torroba’s “Luisa Fernanda”.
The opera selections will include three pieces set in Seville:
“The barber of Seville”, “Carmen” and “La BohËme”.