We can and must seek common understanding in art, through singing and on the stage – and the Opera Rara Festival is the perfect opportunity!
This year we are faced with a number of questions we couldn’t have even imagined asking before the previous festival. Will we be able to meet all our goals? Will our plans be thwarted by new restrictions or lockdown measures? Will we be able to sit together as an audience, or will we be watching on the computer from the sofa at home? Will we be able to keep the festival in form, even if its events are stretched in time? Forced by the circumstances, the completely restructured and reorganised festival doesn’t change its main idea: to tell stories about our world through opera, and to see other people and their emotions.
The motto of the Opera Rara Festival 2021 is a quote from Sappho, “Stand up and look at me, face to face, my friend”. So let us stand face to face – be it on the screen, wearing masks, in an operatic mirror reflecting our reality – and find that which brings us together.
The summer part of the festival brings one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of music. Therefore, this is a non-rara piece among other rara works. The organisers claim this move to be intended – they want to transfer to the audience some of its lightness even if the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte closes with a bittersweet statement: Women are like that.
In the seemingly carefree farce, two young officers try (not entirely unsuccessfully) to seduce their respective fiancées to show that women cannot be trusted. The opera filled with moral ambiguities, ambivalent emotions and absurd plot twists seems to be perfectly fit for the modern audience. This time, the delicious comedy is produced by Cezary Tomaszewski (director) and Jan Tomasz Adamus (musical director as well as the artistic director of the festival).
direction: Cezary Tomaszewski
Katarzyna Oleś-Blacha – Fiordiligi
Monika Korybalska – Dorabella
Sebastian Szumski – Guglielmo
Przemysław Borys – Ferrando
Marzena Lubaszka – Despina
Jacek Ozimkowski – Don Alfonso
Capella Cracoviensis
Jan Tomasz Adamus
Kraków Citizen Choir (preparation– Joanna Stawarska & Ilona Szczepańska)
Izabela Perez, Szymon Dobosik, Oskar Malinowski – dancers
Paula Grocholska – set design
Aleksander Prowaliński – light
Małgorzata Chruściel – costumes
