Adelaide Festival

2008

Australian Premiere
29 February, 2 & 4 March,
75 mins, no interval
An Opera in Three Images

Music
Osvaldo Golijov

Libretto
David Henry Hwang

Conductor
Giancarlo Guerrero

Director
Graeme Murphy

Assistant to the Director
Janet Vernon

Costume Designer
Jennifer Irwin

Video Designer
Tim Gruchy

Lighting Designer
Damien Cooper

Associate Lighting Designer
& Programmer
Adrian Sterritt

Assistant Conductor
& Chorus Master
Timothy Sexton

Margarita Xirgu
Jessica Rivera

Federico García Lorca
Kelley O’Connor

Nuria
Leanne Kenneally

Ruiz Alonso (Arresting Officer)
Jamie Allen

Jose Tripaldi (Guard)
Stephen Bennett

Torero (Bullfighter)
James Egglestone

Maestro (Teacher)
Adam Goodburn

Spirit of Mariana Pineda/
Voice of the Fountain (Dancer)
Jan Pinkerton

Guitar
Slava Grigoryan
Leonard Grigoryan

Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

 

 

 

 

 

Adelaide Advertiser Review (excerpts)
AINADAMAR, the fountain of tears, is almost too beautiful. A crowded Festival Theatre greeted it with noisy and enthusiastic applause.
This is how you open a festival with something rare and very special.
It is essentially a work of intimacy, a chamber opera, but one which in Graeme Murphy's production fills the stage and the theatre with sumptuous music and movement.
The production is marked by the exquisite flow of light and colour across the curved screens of the set.
Gloriously coloured, beautifully played, staged with astounding theatricality, this is a triumph for State Opera and a work to see again.
In short: Radiant, intimate and moving

 

 

REALTIME #84 Review (Excerpts) © Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

www.realtimearts.net

Director Graeme Murphy gives Ainadamar the grand opera treatment. Curved moveable screens by Brian Thompson move about the large Adelaide Festival Theatre stage like giant sculptures. Tim Gruchy projects potent images onto them, effectively evoking the historical moment and Lorca's symbolism. The all female chorus dances. A huge upstage waterfall (a curtain of real water in odd addition to Gruchy's projections) evokes the Ainadamar Fountain. The spirit of Maria Xirgu and of the fountain are embodied in a frequently present dancer, who despite the occasional flamenco inflection appears to have wandered in from a Sydney Dance Company production. Overall, the scale of the production and the opera itself didn't seem to match. The principals sang well but rather quietly, the orchestra seemed likewise restrained, although the pulse of their playing was right. Much of the opera takes the form of intimate duets. It feels like a chamber opera,but here the performers seemed dwarfed by the production.