NEW OPERA

July 17 & 18, 2013, São Luíz Municipal Theatre, integrated in the Teatro de Almada Festival (avant-première)

September 27, 2013, Warsaw Autumn International Contemporary Music Festival, Poland (world-premiere)

October 10-25, 2013, tour in Sweden

SINOPSIS

A Laugh to Cry explores some primary concerns, which have always haunted human beings, and reveals them from the perspective of our contemporary globalized world. This gains shape through a meditation on the hegemonic power of the destruction of memory, the devastation of the Earth and even the collapse of humanity.

The Opera evolves in the fringes between dream and reality; between the visible and invisible. It is divided in several acts where five characters, two sopranos, one bass and two narrators (a female and a male voice), live and dwell constantly between these two parallels. It also involves 7 acoustic instruments: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, percussion, live-electronics and extended video scenography.

A Laugh to Cry is a metaphysical theatre embodying eternal archetypes with music and multilingual libretto by Miguel Azguime

A Laugh to Cry pursues Miguel Azguime’s goal, as a poet and composer, to grasp an ideal balance between language and music, to merge the language’s semantic and metaphorical components with its sonic values, in order to achieve his concept of “speech as music and music as speech”. A Laugh to Cry extends Miguel Azguime’s research on voice analysis, re-synthesis and processing, aiming at creating a dynamic continuum between timbre, harmony, rhythm and voice spectra.