Comic opera/staged cantata
Librettist: Edward Ayres d’Abreu
Libretto constructed in collaboration with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence sources
Date: 2023
Language: Portuguese
Duration: 55 minutes
Small-scale
Bunny, kind of a bunny girl: soprano
Benny, the love of her life: absent
Augur: tenor
Priestess: cellist
Boris: pianist
Atchim, the barman: clarinettist
The rest of the drunks: orchestra
Imagine, like, a piano bar, but like not exactly: a kind of rehearsal space for a symphonic band. Anyway, that doesn’t, like, matter at all. The big issue is that, like, Bunny, sort of the main character, is in love with Benny, who’s like a secondary character. There is, however, a problem between them, derived like from the vicissitudes of life. Meanwhile, they say that things only get resolved with the intervention of an Augur and a Priestess – and that’s what we want to see…
Cl | Pf | Vc + Orchestra
The opera is the epitome of what “collaborative creation” means: a long process, marked by advances and setbacks that so often seem to tell the story of an “other opera” within the production of the opera itself. Creating for these fantastic forces (QC & BSP) has always been a joy free from limitations, and I believe that this feeling of freedom is clearly visible and audible in everything that exists in this Delícia de Morangos e Chantilly (2023). The work of Edward (libretto) and later of António (staging) always acted as a driving force for this score, which gave me so much pleasure to create. This is how the world should be: cooperative and collaborative, so that our ideas may possess tangible forces in more sensory receptors – which is a way of saying “people”.
Date: 2024
Venue: Sala Suggia, Casa da Música, Porto
Commission: Quarteto Contratempus
Stage Direction: António Durães
Music Direction: Jan Wierzba
Cast: Ana Rosa Silva, Natalie Gonçalves, Teresa Nunes, Miguel Leitão, Carolina Leite Freitas, Bernardo Pinhal, Crispim Luz and Banda Sinfónica Portuguesa
