FROM AROUND THE WORLD: BARCELONA.(Review)

Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote is one of those compelling literary creations composers find irresistible -- Telemann, Purcell, Ibert, Massenet, Minkus, Ravel, Strauss and Falla have set his romantic delusions and wacky wanderings one way or another. Now contemporary Spanish composer Jose Luis Turina has attempted a full-blown opera on the subject, venturing into postmodern territory. It's called DQ: Don Quijote en Barcelona. The libretto by Justo Navarro casts aside the gargantuan novel, lifts Don Quixote out of his original setting and lets the character run amok as a free-floating signifier in a futuristic context.

In Act II, Quixote literally floats above the stage: he is caged within a huge eyeball in a dirigible hovering above a colorful crowd of voyeurs, a kind of circus freak-show hosted by twin sisters in jack-in-the-boxes, in Hong Kong in the year 3016. The rest of the set in this act is stunning -- a mirrored wall and enormous video screen face off above a maze of walkways in a chilling cityscape reminiscent of Blade Runner. This scene captures what this opera is all about: if Don Quixote was out of joint with his own time, imagine how he feels here, singing his antiquated songs with their antiquated messages in a consumeristic, illiterate, loveless, hypervisual society. It ain't pretty.

But it's nearly impossible to say much more about what this opera is about, since the libretto, which cleverly parallels certain events in the novel, is not very coherent -- perhaps that's part of the point. The production is the brainchild of those Catalan bad boys of theater, La Fura dels Baus, who have recently begun to stage operas with electrifying results. Their last piece was Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust, performed in Salzburg two years ago -- galvanizing audiences with screaming streams of enigmatic images.

In DQ, these images are accompanied by a vivid operatic soundtrack. ...