The Peralada Festival offers a sensorial and spiritual journey to paradise through 12 shows.

Peralada has already entered the creative paradise. This 39th edition, which began this Thursday with a recital by Joyce DiDonato, is an invitation to transform the castle gardens into a living stage of creation and emotion. It is structured like a symphony in 12 movements, 12 shows that propose a sensorial and spiritual journey under the theme of the garden as paradise: world premieres, contemporary creation, dance, flamenco, opera, early music, lied, performance...

Today, Friday, dancer and choreographer Lorena Nogal—2024 National Dance Award winner and the soul of Marcos Morau's La Veronal—presents Le terroir , a duet with dancer Álvaro Esteban in which, inspired by the process of transformation of grapes into wine, she explores the constant metamorphosis that human beings undergo. This is a site-specific creation conceived for Celler Perelada, in which the earth, the air, and the rural and architectural surroundings serve to break the fourth wall with the audience and guide them through still lifes distributed throughout the space.

World premieres, contemporary creation, dance, flamenco, early music, lied, performance...

Another festival production stars two regulars, stage director Rafael R. Villalobos and countertenor Xavier Sabata. In keeping with the spirit of this edition, which seeks risky, unconventional, and more hybrid offerings, they present the unclassifiable Genius Loci (The Genius of Place), "soundscapes in five scenes for countertenor, plucked strings, and electronics," according to Villalobos. Namely: Time, Space, Matter, Antimatter, and Genius Loci . All of this emerges from the reading of The Lost Garden (1912), a cult book by the Icelandic-born English gardener and philosopher Jörn de Précy, halfway between a diary, an essay, and a gardening treatise. Cachito Vallés provides the visual framework for the musicians/actors to interpret the work based on the vocal music of British composers whose work spans five centuries.

The festival also featured the first on-stage encounter between two tenors, father and son, Christoph and Julian Prégardien, in a performance that unites the lyrical depth of Schubert and the pianistic virtuosity of Liszt. They will be joined by pianist Saskia Giorgini and narrator and actress Alba Pujol. This will take place on Sunday, before a second week of the festival in which Frames Percussion will unleash avant-garde music inspired by the sounds of nature, not without humor, criticism, and sonic poetry. This is Opera (forse) by Italian composer Francesco Filidei, a work with six percussionists and a narrator, which ironically questions the limits of operatic form, combining the sounds of birds, water, wind, and deconstructed rhythms with independent scenes set to texts by Pierre Senges. This will be followed on the 10th by the fusion of the Ballet Flamenco de Andalucía with the Accademia del Piacere and Fahmi Alqhai, who are exploring the shared tradition of flamenco and baroque music in Origen. La semilla de los tiempos.

The rest of the edition includes gems such as Handel's opera Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno , by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, or the unclassifiable opera-monologue Hort / Garden , created jointly by actress and musician Elena Tarrats and playwright Helena Tornero.