Under the stage direction of David Alden and the musical direction of Ivor Bolton, the Baroque opera La Calisto will be presented between March 17 and 26 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, in a production of the State Opera of Bavaria.

Between 17 and 26 March the Teatro Real will offer 9 performances of La Calisto, by Francesco Cavalli: an insolent, lascivious, hyperbolic and fun Baroque opera, which will be presented for the first time in Madrid, in a production from the State Opera of Bavaria.

The Callisto is the epitome of all this: a plot full of humor, sex, machinations, social criticism and surreptitious moral resonances; an inventive and melodious music that allows the brilliance and improvisation of the singers; different locations to stimulate the change of curtains, trapdoors and scenic tricks; attractive games of transformism ─Calisto is turned into a bear and then ascends to the heavens in the form of a constellation … ─ and a cast of fantastic characters ─Dioses, demigods, nymphs, satyrs … ─ for the exhibition of exotic costumes.

David Alden – who directs his fourth title at the Teatro Real, after Alcina (2015), Otello (2016) and Lucia di Lammermoor (2018) ─ presents the delirious world of La Calisto, with winks complicit to the spectator of today, in a set of psychedelic evocations by Paul Steinberg, withinspired figurines comic- designed by Buki Shiff and lighting by Pat Collins.

The director of the Teatro Real, Ivor Bolton, who has already directed this production at Covent Garden in London and at the Bavarian State Opera, will do so again at the Teatro Real, this time leading the Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble and the Orchestra Baroque of Seville.

As it happened in Idomeneo, recently presented at the Teatro Real, Ivor Bolton will accompany the recitatives in one of the three keys that will be used in the opera.

A double cast of singers very close to the baroque repertoire will give life to the characters of La Calisto: Karina Gauvin and Rachel Kelly (L’Eternità / Giunone), Monica Bacelli and Teresa Iervolino (Il Destino / Diana / Le furie), Luca Tittoto and Wolfgang Schwaiger (Giove), Nikolay Borchev and Borja Quiza (Mercury), Louise Alder and Anna Devin(Callisto), Tim Mead and Xavier Sabata (Endimione), Guy de Mey and Francisco Vas (Linfea), Dominique Visse (La Natura / Satirino) / Le furie), Ed Lyon and Juan Sancho (Pane) and Andrea Mastroni (Silvano).

The prolific composer and theater impresario Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) is credited with the birth of the opera in Venice and its consolidation as a popular artistic genre, which in the middle of the seventeenth century filled six different theaters in the city of channels. An audience eager for entertainment, fun and transgression came to the opera to enjoy the truculent stories of its protagonists, the ingenuity of the scenic machinery, the fantasy of the costumes and a world of illusion without censorship or barriers.