April 2019
Repertoire
Je Suis Narcissiste (opera buffa)
Raquel García Tomás, music
Helena Tornero, libreto
Performers
Orquestra Simfònica Camera Musicae
Elena Copons, soprano
María Hinojosa, soprano
Joan Ribalta, tenor
Toni Marsol, baritone
Marta Pazos, stage direction
Vinicius Kattah, musical direction
Programme notes
Making a critique of what we appear to be but are not through black humor and sitting to see and hear things that would not generate any “like” on social networks, it is as original and daring as it is real and necessary. The suffering of the protagonist, who constantly attracts people of all kinds but with the same profile: they speak but they do not listen, leading him to an eccentric psychiatrist in order to find a solution to this problem.
Based on a Vienna cafe and inspired by the personality of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Bernhard, the bold Raquel García Tomas, Helena Tornero and later Marta Pazos thought about how to ally their enormous creativity in order to break the mirror of each one of us and to open a window that allows us to enter the breeze and extend the horizons of our absurd comfort zone. Nine scenes and four players who, by developing seventeen different roles, will make us laugh, they will make us think and above all.
Biography Raquel García-Tomás
Raquel García-Tomás is a composer specialising in interdisciplinary creation who is currently finishing a Doctorate at the Royal College of Music. Highlights of her career include collaborations with the English National Ballet, the Royal British Society of Sculptors, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Dresdener Musikfestspiele. In the season 2015/16, she was the invited composer of the contemporary music festival Sampler Sèries organised by L’Auditori de Barcelona. Recently, Raquel has received the award El Ojo Crítico Música Clásica 2017 granted by RTVE (Spanish Radio and Television Corporation), “for the originality of her artistic approaches and the use and combination of her musical language with new technologies and video creation”.
Within the framework of operatic creation, she has taken part in DIDO Reloaded, produced by Òpera de Butxaca i Nova Creació Barcelona and thanks to the opera Go, ÆNEAS, go!, has been awarded the Neuköllner Oper’s Berliner Opernpreis’14. She has also collaborated as a composer and video artist with stage director Matthias Rebstock in the creation of Büro für postidentisches Leben, premiered at the GREC festival in Barcelona and at the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin, in 2016. Her chamber opera disPLACE – Història d’una casa, which she premiered at the MusikTheaterTage Wien Festival 2015, has recently been performed in Teatros del Canal within the season 2016/17 of the Teatro Real in Madrid.
Raquel has recently premiered the monodrama Balena Blava (text by Victòria Szpunberg) for one actress, large orchestra, choir and electronics, at the National Theatre of Catalonia. She is currently working on her new opera, Je Suis Narcissiste (libretto by Helena Tornero), which will be premiered within the upcoming season of the Teatro Real de Madrid.