JOAN-ALBERT AMARGOS

 

Euridice & Charon's puppets

 

[Euridice y los Titeres de Caronte]

 

Opera based on the book by Toni Rumbau

Claudia Schneider (Sofía)

Marc Canturri (Óscar)

Toni Rumbau (voice of the puppets)

Orquesta Barcelona 216/ Joan Albert Amargós

 

Euridice and Charon's puppets, a new opera based around the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, moves the legend into the present day: Sofia, a young and well-known opera singer, has her life turned upside-down on learning that she has an incurable disease. Her partner, Oscar, a musicologist and conductor, refuses to accept the impending doom. The work interlaces two genres as distinct as opera and puppetry, allowing classical and popular music to engage with each other in lively a dialogue in an opera which is approachable for a young audience.

 

Euridice and Charon's Puppets brings together two genres that take the artificial elements of the theatre to their extremes: the play of vocal and

musical conventions on the one hand, and the play of the articulated dolls that have their own life and that talk and sing, in this case, with the distorted voice of the "swazzle". It was precisely the idea of bringing together the human voice with this other strange voice, traditionally used by puppets, that was the starting point of the project, in which the world of popular culture represented by Polichinela (the Mediterranean version of Punch) comes face to face with the world of opera and the mythological fatalism of Eurydice. The music of Joan Albert Amargós is passionately submerged in this field full of ambiguities and of contrasts, organised by an extraordinary use of the resources employed: a five-piece orchestra and three different timbres of voice.

 

Swazzle: a small device placed in the mouth like a musical instrument, between the tongue and the palate, to distort and amplify the voice. For centuries this screeching, impertinent and rather irreverent sound has been the typical voice of traditional street puppet shows.

 

Harmonia Mundi HMI987065