Teatro Colón: Creating Opera Stars and New Work

For the last seven years, Music of the Americas has presented up-and-coming voice students from the Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colón, as winners of a competition held at the Institute are awarded the opportunity to travel to New York City to present concerts of classics from the repertoire, attend operas, and participate in masterclasses and coachings. In the last year, Music of the Americas expanded its relationship with the Colón, one of the leading opera houses in the Western Hemisphere, by initiating a partnership with the Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón (CETC). Through the CETC, the Colón is able to establish an environment in which composers can create, audiences can get to know new works, and musicians can enjoy the challenges of premiering them. 

Gallos y huesos, a "secular oratorio" for six singers and harp, was commissioned by the CETC and premiered in fall 2012. This work involves three Argentine artists: composer Pablo Ortiz, professor at UC-Davis; writer Sergio Chejfec, professor at New York University; and visual artist Eduardo Stupía, who is based in Buenos Aires. Roosters and Bones addresses the seductive violence of the act of cockfighting in several significant ways: musically, with Ortiz's lilting music, which evokes delicate madrigals; visually, by the surreal combination of imagery in Stupía's projections behind the performers; and with text, using Chejfec's mysterious and haunting poetry.

The U.S. premiere, presented by Music of the Americas at HERE Arts Center in New York City, played to a packed house on June 2, 2014. The creative team behind the premiere, including CETC's Miguel Galperín, worked alongside the performers and technical team at HERE to adapt the work for the new hall. Meridionalis and Argentine harpist Lucrecia Jancsa were led by Music of the Americas Director Sebastián Zubieta.

This fall, Zubieta travels to Buenos Aires for two nights of his compositions, performed by contemporary music experts from Argentina. A graduate of Yale School of Music and the Universidad Católica Argentina, where he studied composition and musicology, Zubieta enjoys a diverse career, conducting early music around the globe, notably a series of concerts in Peru this August, as well as curating for Americas Society. This series of performances will feature compositions from the last decade based on the poetry of Petrarch. 

This fall, librettist and novelist Pola Oloixarac, composer Esteban Insinger, and sculptor Luna Paiva will premiere Hercules en el Matto Grosso, a story of madness and self-discovery set in the Brazilian rainforest, at the CETC. Music of the Americas will present the U.S. premiere of this exceptional new opera in the spring of 2015. Read an article about the life and work of Hercule Florence on Aperture.