The Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo begins its programming in 2022 with two musical shows: on January 27, the Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas will perform and on January 28, the Colombian Urpi Barco, in a concert that combines jazz with Latin American rhythms , celebrates the first decade of one of his most recognized productions, ‘Sueños’.

On Thursday, January 27, 2022, the stage of the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo will have its first show of the year and thus opens a season that will regularly include classical and popular music events, theater, dance and opera.

The person in charge of opening the year will be a very special guest who rescues the lyrical tradition: the Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas, one of the most outstanding in Latin America, will perform a recital accompanied by the Georgian pianist Mzia Bakhtouridze. It will be a night of celebration in which iconic opera pieces will be rescued, but also classic songs from the Mediterranean and Latin America.

Ramón Vargas began his career in the 1980s, when he won the Enrico Caruso competition for tenors in Milan, Italy, and settled in Austria to perfect his musical studies. Since 1990 he began to appear in international theaters and festivals and in 1992 he appeared at the Metropolitan Theater in New York playing Edgardo in ‘Lucia de Lamermoor’, alongside June Anderson and replacing Luciano Pavarotti. His presentation was so outstanding that years later he made his debut at the Scala in Milan, where he embodied the role of Fenton, under the baton of Riccardo Muti, in the production commissioned from Giorgio Strehler on the occasion of the centenary of ‘Falstaff’.

Ramón Vargas’ discography includes recordings of operas by Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, Werther, Massenet and Granados. In addition, he permanently participates in recitals with opera arias, Christmas songs, and various programs of popular Italian and Mexican songs. ‘Opera Now’, from England, consecrated him as artist of the year in 2000 and the magazine ‘Festspiele Magazin’ has positioned him in the first place of the tenors, worldwide, in the last four years.

The concert will take place on Thursday, January 27, at 8 p.m., at the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo. Tickets from 40,000 pesos.

The next day, the singer and songwriter Urpi Barco will take the stage to celebrate the tenth anniversary of ‘Sueños’, her first solo album. The concert will be a journey through the universes of the albums ‘Manglares’, ‘Retrato’, ‘Palpitar’, and ‘Sueños’, in which Urpi and his group navigate the songs of vogue, the bambuco, the cumbia, the currulao , the chalupa, the joint and the ballads of the Atrato River to make traditional songs dressed in jazz.

Urpi, which means “dove” in Quechua, is currently one of the most recognized singers and composers in the field of new Colombian music and Latin American jazz. She was born in Bogotá, but she lived a large part of her childhood in Medellín and Cali, a city where she began her artistic studies at the Antonio María Valencia Conservatory and the Fine Arts Theater School. She later studied at the Francisco José de Caldas District University and the El Liceu Conservatory in Barcelona (Spain). With more than 20 years of experience on stage, Urpi has had three musical productions as a soloist: For 22 years she has worked as a singer, actress and musical director of the Fundación Teatro Comunidad, where she participates in the creation of soundtracks for works of theatre, puppets and children’s concerts and since 2010 she has been a teacher of popular singing at the School of Arts and Music of the Sergio Arboleda University, an academic space in which she was also coordinator of the singing area and voice researcher.

This concert will be on Friday, January 28, at 8 p.m., at the Teatro Estudio del Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo. Tickets of 30,000 and 40,000 pesos.