⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Alfredo Tejada as Ruiz Alonso in Ainadamar | Credit: Johan Persson 

Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar (Spanish for The Well of Tears) is often referred to as a flamenco opera. Premiered in 2003, it uses many Spanish influences, not just the cante (song), baile (dance) and toque (guitar) of flamenco but musical styles that reference Gitano, from Spain’s Roma tradition as well as Andalusian folk songs and even Moorish music from medieval times.

The piece is an 80-minute blast of sound and spectacle from start to finish. The score is rich, vigorous, muscular, terrifying and yet tender too and there is never a still moment. Welsh National Opera’s orchestra was augmented by three percussionists and two guitarists, playing eighteen different instruments between them. The group received their own curtain call at the end.

Olijov wrote this brief music drama without an interval and without worrying too much about narrative clarity. There were in fact three stories being played out on a circular stage. We had the death of Margarita Xirgu (Jaquelina Livieri) in the late 1960s who is reminiscing to her protégé, Nuria before going on stage for the last time. We also had the younger Margarita acting as muse of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, urging him (unsuccessfully) to flee the brutality of the Civil War in Spain. Finally we have Margarita performing for the last time the historic character of Mariana Pineda, a nineteenth-century political martyr whom she first embodied for Lorca from 1927 at the beginning of his short-lived career. 

Jaquelina Livieri as Margarita Xirgu and Hanna Hipp as Federico García Lorca in Ainadamar : Credit Johan Persson

Though relentlessly powerful - and adequately surtitled - the opera was difficult to follow unless you had the programme’s synopsis to hand (and not always then).

Ainadamar is a lament for those who were killed around the Well of Tears in Granada at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Among them was the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (sung by Hanna Hipp) whose words are not only remembered by his muse Margarita but which are projected on to a chainmail beaded curtain that encircled the action. So peripheral is Lorca to Margarita’s narrative, however, that s/he was only included as a character in a subsequent revision of the opera.

So what Welsh National Opera (in association with three other international companies and Opera Ventures) presented this/last autumn was a series of tableaux: Lorca remembered meeting Xirgu, Lorca refusing to flee Spain to Cuba, and eventually being executed most unheroically. The poet was just a number of bodies lined up for firing squad in a scene that owes more to the brutal reality of Spain’s Civil War and less to the traditions of grand opera. 

Any production of Ainadmar probably ends up representing a paradox. Musically it is a flawless and engrossing piece. This production by the Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker  was performed in and out of that chain mail curtain -which was great for projection purposes -and it was furiously inventive but it really wasn’t an opera. It was a series of tableaux that brought Golijov’s music alive, but failed to connect narratively with the audience because instead of a story we had a disjointed progression of events.

Jaquelina Livieri as Margarita Xirgu Julieth Lozano Rolong as Nuria in Ainadamar | Credit: Johan Persson

Argentine soprano Jaquelina Livieri as the balletic Margarita Xirgu was superb, both in voice and movement. Of all the skirts that were swished in this ever-moving show, hers were the most powerful. By comparison Hanna Lipp as Lorca had little to work with – not surprising given that her character was an afterthought. Alfredo Tejada, a professional singer of flamenco from Granada played right wing politician, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, as a terrifying villain spouting homophobic rhetoric in his determination to destroy Lorca. or anyone who was held to be anti-Falangist.

Maybe with all the new special effects tools at its disposal 21^st century opera no longer needs to be quite so dependent on narrative. We had sound, music and fury, we had spectacle, special effects and dance but personally I still enjoy a good story. 

And this was not.