NO-ONE can accuse Scottish Opera of lacking artistic ambition.
The company’s latest project – a staging of Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s 2003 opera Ainadamar (an Andalusian term taken from the Arabic “Ayn al-Dam”, meaning “The Fountain of Tears”) – marks the opera debut of the internationally acclaimed Brazilian choreographer and stage director Deborah Colker.
The opera reimagines the life of the great Andalusian poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by the fascist forces of General Franco on account of his left-wing politics and his homosexuality. No work about Lorca can be complete without a sense of duende, the Andalusian concept (central to the music and dance of flamenco) that encapsulates a heightened and simultaneous sense of life, desire and mortality.
