album preview

The girl Belisa is beautiful, amorous and sensual. “White underneath. Like sugar”; so sings the enchanted Don Perlimplin about his young bride. But already on her wedding night Belisa takes five lovers in front of the sleeping bridegroom, and the opera develops from stylized opera buffa into a mystical, ambivalent drama with an enigmatic ending. Poul Rovsing Olsen's opera based on the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa is a chamber play about eroticism, love and death; at once tragic and grotesque.

Poul Rovsing Olsen underscores the surrealistic aspect of Lorca's drama with dreamlike music. Belisa's wonderful songs cast an exotic lustre over the fundamentally lyrical tone of the opera. Belisa fuses elements of the Arab musical tradition with European modernism in a through-composed totality. A musical encounter between different cultures is elevated into a unique operatic work that has won a special status in recent Danish music.