Falla and Flamenco

Part of 2010 the Spring Season

Sat, Apr 17 at 8pm

El Corregidor y la Molinera
By Manuel de Falla
Orchestra of St Luke’s
Conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez

When Spanish poet Federico García Lorca declared flamenco his people’s “most gigantic creation,” he understood its unique ability to heighten emotion through an amalgam of music, song, and dance. Manuel de Falla (1876—1946), considered Spain’s preeminent composer, infused the dramatic exuberance of this indigenous genre into modern musical forms, forging a new national idiom that revitalized Spanish music and propelled flamenco to international attention.

Falla and Flamenco is a program of three works by Falla that imbue 20th-century music with flamenco’s ancient gypsy traditions. El Corregidor y la Molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife), in its US stage premiere, is an early incarnation of the beloved score for Diaghilev’s ballet The Three-Cornered Hat. A rambunctious story of seduction and mishaps told through music, pantomime, and dance, this intimate masterpiece features choreography by the daring Ramón Oller for thirteen dancers from Barcelona’s Passatges Dansa and New York’s Peridance Ensemble. Fantasía Baetica is an audacious piece for solo piano that expresses the raw, unadorned side of flamenco and Nights in the Gardens of Spain, for piano and orchestra, is the composer’s beguiling evocation of Andalusia.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
110min with intermission
Subscription tickets: $16, 24, 32, 40
Full price: $20, 30, 40, 50


Choreography by Ramon Oller
Pedro Carbone, piano
13 dancers from Passatges Dansa (Barcelona) and Peridance Ensemble (NYC)