UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 01 SEPTEMBER 2022
PhD researcher Daniel Blanco recently premiered a chamber opera version of his work ‘La Obisparra’, a folk operatic masquerade, at the international chamber opera festival LittleOpera in Zamora, Spain.
The première took place on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 August after being postponed for a month due to the wildfires in the country, that severely affected the region.
This piece was previously performed at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2016 as an orchestral masquerade, in which audiences witnessed the wildness and brutality of the wolf-scaring winter pagan masquerades of the remote isolated regions of Castile-Leon in Spain.
The project in Zamora included performing in the village that inspired the piece, Riofrío de Aliste, home of the ethnographically distinctive masquerade of ‘Los Carochos de Riofrío’.
This will not be Daniel’s only performance in Spain this summer, as he will be participating at the International Chamber Music Festival of Godella in Valencia, for which he was commissioned to create a multidisciplinary work about highly political poet and philosopher, Joan Fuster.
Daniel said: “I was incredibly delighted and eager to finally be able to perform ‘La Obisparra’ at its place of origin. I hope these performances can have a positive impact in a place that has suffered for a long time due to lack of investment, loss of population and most recently, the hit of wildfires.
“The people from Riofrío and Zamora were also very excited for this to happen, as they have fought for several years to see this production. They were also part of it, as the same people of the villages participated by performing in the opera in their very own traditional costumes and masks.”