When the awardees keep canceling their attendance at the awards gala, the best thing is for the ingenuity of a stage director to raise the bar of the event. Yesterday there was luck at the 8th edition of the Ópera XXI, which happily returned to Barcelona, with Joan Anton Rechi designing the lyrical-dramatic show at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Tenor José Manuel Zapata and actress Llum Barrera acted as masters of ceremony before 1,300 people. And they did so with a sense of humor during the more than two hours the gala lasted.
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Soprano Sabina Puértolas, who was going to receive the award for best female singer, opened the evening from the back of the stalls. In complicity with the audience, she crossed the stalls performing the Tango de la Menegilda. Zarzuela was going to be very present in the musical numbers of the gala.
The Liceu was preparing to celebrate the best of the 2024-25 season held in theaters and festivals in Spain and Ibero-America. But, alas, the great Nadine Sierra, best international artist, would not come from Madrid, where she is rehearsing Romeo and Juliet; nor would Àlex Ollé, best stage director, take a plane from Syracuse, where he is preparing a production. Gustavo Gimeno, best musical director, who was in Boston, would not make an appearance either. Not even Manuel Fuentes, the Alicante bass who deserved the award for best young singer, would get permission from the German theater where he is working to travel to Barcelona.
Schedules in the opera world are tremendous but what is the future of awards of this caliber when, even focusing on the country’s talent, they fail to commit the awarded figures to attend to receive them?
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Rechi fills absences at the Liceu gala with José Manuel Zapata and Llum Barrera
Tenor Jorge de León, best male singer, performed with Miguel Huertas on piano the romance of Soledad, by Rodrigo Prats, and Zapata set the comic tone with the Tango de doña virtudes . From the Royal Theatre, Joan Matabosch received the award for best production for The Tale of Tsar Saltan, by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Víctor García de Gomar did the same with the award for best contemporary lyrical creation, Benjamin in Portbou, alongside composer Antoni Ros-Marbà, who waited seven years to be able to premiere this work at the Liceu.
The Spanish lyrical heritage award distinguished the recovery of The Gypsy for Love, by Manuel García, carried out by the Ópera Estudio de Málaga. And the dissemination award was won by the children’s company La Federica, resident at the Oviedo Opera, while a handful of kids from the north of the peninsula cheered their leader at the moment of thanks.
Alfons Flores, Felipe Ramos, Ana Garay – the first to say “bona nit” on a night very sparse in the use of Catalan – and Pedro Chamizo received creative-technical awards, while the honorary awards went to the Centre de Perfeccionament del Palau de Les Arts de Valencia; to the patronage of the Fundació Banc Sabadell, and to the founders of the Ópera XXI Association themselves, for their contribution to the consolidation of the Spanish lyrical sector in the last two decades. An endogamic gala, then, that still aspires to become the Goyas of lyric opera.
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