MENOTTI’S OPERA PREMIERE IN SARAJEVO
The author’s duo, Aleksandar Nikolić and Aleksandar Ilić, after four years, are re-cooperating with the artists of that theater, and on the 29th Apil will present the comic opera Phone or love in trio, by composer Gian Carlo Menotti.
At its heart, Menotti’s Phone is a small diamond that gives us everything in 23 minutes that opera audiences love: A baritonal anger as from the best of Verdi’s opera, a parody of Donosti’s lamentations of the main heroes, then remonstring the power of colored colors like the Queen of Night from Mozart, and a passionate love duet as from Pucini’s opera.
All the ingredients are here, however, instead of 180 minutes compressed into just 23 minutes of stage roller-coaster. However, nothing lacks the Phone, especially not a conflict between two exciting characters, a capricious room with obsessed Lusy and charming Ben, who is in love. However, Menota wrote this work in 1947. He predicted a problem that is much more active today than 75 years ago.
The opera is conducted by Maestro Dario Vučić, and the opera is performed by Aida Corbadžić in the role of Lucy, and Marko Kalajanović in the role of Ben. Aleksandar’s choreography is performed by the Ballet Ensemble of Selma Strbo Arnautović, Sabina Sokolović, Marijana Marić and Til Čmancanin in highly stylized costumes by Ata Omerbašić.
Perhaps for a few decades, when artificial intelligence beats humanity, cyborgs will continue to set up the opera written by a man with the same love and passion for antique tragedies of the old Greeks that no longer exist. Maybe they will read this opera from another angle-as the first heroic opera work in which the machine triumphed over the man, as the director Nikolić states.
The first reprise was scheduled for April 30th in the division of Melisa Hajrulahović Tomić and Erol Ramadanović.