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FULL Cartas Portuguesas (Ripper) Belo Horizonte 2021 Camila Titinger
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Cartas Portuguesas or Portuguese Letters
- Composer: Ripper Joan Guilherme
- Libretto: Mariana Alcoforado
- Venue & Opera Company: Sala Minas, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
- Recorded: June 10, 2021
- Type: Concert Semi-staged
- Singers: Camila Titinger, Erika Muniz, Deborah Bulgarelli, Nívea Freitas
- Conductor: ROBERTO TIBIRIÇÁ
- Orchestra: Orquestra Filarmônica de Minas Gerais
- Stage Director: Jorge Takla
- Stage Designer: NICOLÁS BONI
- Costume Designer: FÁBIO NAMATAME
- Lighting Designer: NEY BONFANTE
Information about the Recording
- Published by: João Guilherme Ripper
- Date Published: 2021
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
The work is based on a 17th-century book containing the love letters of the Portuguese nun Maria Alcoforado, who was in love with the French officer Noël. Ripper, who also wrote the libretto, combined the letters with passages from the Bible and texts by the Portuguese Baroque poet Rodrigues Lobo. “The letters speak of love, melancholy, hate, hope. These are recurring themes that permeate his writing. And I felt the need to include other elements to create a sense of dramatic evolution for the narrative,” he told CONCERTO Magazine at the time of the premiere.
In the show, with an almost devotional delivery, Maria Alcoforado expresses her passion and suffers due to the impossibility of its realization. The text is pure emotional drama, undoubtedly very appropriate for an operatic adaptation.
Ripper created a consistent work, in which Maria Alcoforado’s varied emotional states develop with increasing intensity. With inventiveness and using a language of expanded tonalism – which also explores rich sound effects –, the composer constructed the musical discourse in skillful conjunction with the narrative. It is a tone of devastating melancholy that permeates the story, Maria feels alone and abandoned. “It is an opera about confinement”, says Ripper, who points out the similarity with the time of confinement we are living with the pandemic today.