Luisa Miller

To see soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and tenor Piotr Beczala together on stage is always a major event. Both will be back at the Liceu, along with fellow cast-members Eleonora Buratto, Luca Salsi, Juan Jesús Rodríguez and Arturo Chacón-Cruz, to bring us one of Verdi's most clearly Romantic operas, in which the style of his mature works is already perceptible. Luisa Miller was composed immediately before his "popular trilogy". It is an intense but tranquil opera based on Kabale und Liebe, a bourgeois drama by Friedrich Schiller, whose works were one of Verdi's favorite sources. Damiano Michieletto puts the spotlight on the drama of Rodolfo and Luisa, the two innocent protagonists oppressed by their authoritarian fathers, and shows two children beside them who represent the children they themselves still are. The production, set in pre-Romantic Germany, gives an elegant but forceful rendering of the original text, as adapted by librettist Cammarano, and of Verdi's score.