Aarón Zapico opens the 72nd edition of the Granada International Music and Dance Festival at the Palace of Carlos V on Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 June with a program on the figure of Don Quixote. The core piece will be Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro, in commemoration of the centenary of its premiere on June 25, 1923 at the palace of the Princess of Polignac in Paris, almost exactly 100 years ago. Aarón will lead the Ciudad de Granada Orchestra with Alicia Amo, soprano (Trujamán), David Alegret, tenor (Maese Pedro), José Antonio López, baritone (Don Quixote), Juan Carlos Garvayo, harpsichord, and the Compañía Etcétera, with Enrique Lanz as stage director and responsible for the puppets, set design and projections. The program, entitled El retablo de Maese Pedro. Un tríptico sobre Don Quijote, also includes Burlesque de Quichotte, overture-suite in G major, TWV 55:G1 (1716) by Georg Philipp Telemann, and a selection from Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, op. 97 (1743) by Joseph Bodin Boismortier.
As the festival explains, Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de Maese Pedro, one of the most unique and important stage works in the history of Spanish music, was premiered at the palace of the Princess of Polignac in Paris on June 25, 1923. Conceived as a brief chamber opera for puppets on an episode of Don Quixote, the work had already been heard in concert version in March of that same year at the Teatro San Fernando in Seville. For the Parisian premiere, Falla had the collaboration of professor, engraver and set designer Hermenegildo Lanz. In 2009, his grandson Enrique Lanz, director of the prestigious Compañía Etcétera, created giant puppets to present the play at the Teatro Real, and it is these puppets that will now arrive on the stage of the Alhambra, together with the OCG, Aarón Zapico, a group of select Spanish singers and a couple of Cervantine works from the Baroque period to complete the programme.
Aarón has just returned from Mexico after conducting the Academia de Música Antigua of the Universidad Autónoma de México in three concerts in various venues of the Mexican capital. The program was made up exclusively of works by Spanish Baroque composers such as José Castel, Francisco Hernández Illana, Vicente Baset, Antonio Literes, Mateo Flecha, José de Nebra, Sebastián Durón or Juan de Navas, grouped under the generic title of Fuego: an imaginary zarzuela of the Hispanic Baroque. Among Aarón’s upcoming commitments are his debuts at the Teatro Real in Madrid to conduct La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola di Alcina by Francesca Caccini, and at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, where he will conduct Antonio Literes’s Los Elementos. He will also lead orchestras such as the Real Filharmonía de Galicia, the Cordoba Orchestra or the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra. Aarón Zapico is a frequent guest at the Granada Festival. He made his debut in 2011 with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which were recorded on an album produced by Winter & Winter. In 2019, Forma Antiqva, the group directed by Zapico, was resident ensemble of the festival. He has also been a teacher in the Manuel de Falla Courses. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, he returned as a teacher and head of the Festival’s Baroque Academy.