elina garanca gran canaria strauss concert

Elina Garanca to perform Strauss in Gran Canaria

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Elina Garanca returns to Gran Canaria for a landmark season concert

Mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca, one of the great stars of the international opera scene, is returning to Gran Canaria to headline one of the most outstanding programmes of the season alongside the Orquesta FilarmΓ³nica de Gran Canaria (OFGC) and its principal conductor, Karel Mark Chichon. The concerts will take place on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 October at 8pm at the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus.

A first for Garanca: Strauss’s Four Last Songs

Garanca has chosen Gran Canaria to perform Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs for the first time, one of the pinnacles of the repertoire for voice and orchestra. Composed in the final years of the composer’s life, setting poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, these four songs are marked by reflection on the passage of time, farewell and the acceptance of death. Strauss completed the score in 1948 and died the following year, so its premiere took place posthumously in London in 1950.

She will also appear as a singer in Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, which the OFGC will perform in its complete version to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Premiered in London in 1919 by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the ballet’s first production brought together figures such as choreographer and dancer LΓ©onide Massine and painter Pablo Picasso, who designed the sets and costumes. The work would go on to become one of the great landmarks of twentieth-century Spanish music.

Spanish premiere of Cindy McTee’s Timepiece

The programme will open with the Spanish premiere of Timepiece by American composer Cindy McTee. First performed in 2000, the work explores time as a musical experience in constant transformation, through the contrast between suspension and movement, stillness and energy. McTee combines repetitive patterns, rhythmically vital structures and carefully controlled writing in a play of tensions between opposing elements that runs throughout the composition.

Two dates at the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus

The concert will take place on Thursday 8 October at 8pm at the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, in collaboration with the Sociedad FilarmΓ³nica de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. This initiative incorporates some of the most outstanding concerts from the OFGC’s subscription season into the Sociedad FilarmΓ³nica’s programme, also offered on Thursdays to attract new audiences. The programme will be repeated on Friday 9 October at 8pm, also at the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, as part of the OFGC’s 2026/27 subscription season.

Ticket information

Tickets (30, 27, 20, 16 and 14 euros) can be purchased through the usual channels online at www.ofgrancanaria.com and at box offices (OFGC headquarters, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus and Teatro PΓ©rez GaldΓ³s). Special discounts are available: 50% for the unemployed and 30% for those over 65 and under 26. Further details can be found at https://ofgc.janto.es/janto/main.php?Nivel=Evento&idEvento=OT2627AB3

About Elina Garanca, mezzo-soprano

Acclaimed on the world’s leading stages as the defining mezzo-soprano of her generation, Elina Garanca was described by the SΓΌddeutsche Zeitung as “the Kundry of our time” following her triumph at the Bayreuth Festival, while The New York Times has praised her iconic portrayal of Bizet’s Carmen as “the best Carmen in 25 years”. With an extraordinary career spanning decades, Elina Garanca is a mezzo-soprano of international standing. Her journey from Riga, Latvia, to the world’s most prestigious opera houses has been marked by exceptional artistic mastery and dedication. Winning critical acclaim and captivating audiences worldwide, she has become a pre-eminent figure in classical music.

Among other roles, she is particularly celebrated for her interpretation of Bizet’s Carmen, a role she has sung to great critical success in most of the major opera houses, including the Wiener Staatsoper, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Berlin Staatsoper, the Arena di Verona and the Metropolitan Opera. Recent highlights include her European tour with Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, under the baton of Daniele Gatti with the Staatskapelle Dresden. In 2024 she made her debut at the Bayreuth Festival in the role of Kundry, becoming the first Latvian singer to perform on that prestigious stage.

Elina appears regularly at the Metropolitan Opera, the Wiener Staatsoper, the ROH Covent Garden, the Salzburg Festival, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Carnegie Hall in New York and Wigmore Hall in London, and continues to give concerts, festival appearances and recitals around the world. She has been honoured with numerous national and international awards, with particular significance attached to the title of KammersΓ€ngerin conferred by the Wiener Staatsoper in recognition of her loyalty to the institution, where she has sung more than 160 performances of 18 different roles since her debut there in 2003. In September 2005, Elina became an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon (DG) artist and, over two decades of collaboration, has released nine solo albums. Two of them (Romantique and Meditation) won the ECHO Klassik award. With her most recent release, When Night Falls (2024), Elina Garanca reflects on the different facets of night and builds a bridge between the music of her childhood and her audience.

Karel Mark Chichon, artistic and principal conductor

British conductor Karel Mark Chichon continues to thrill audiences around the world with his temperament, passion and musicality. In recognition of his services to music, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2012, and in 2016 he was elected a Member of the Royal Academy of Music. Born in London in 1971 to Gibraltarian parents, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music and was assistant conductor to Giuseppe Sinopoli and Valery Gergiev.

Karel Mark Chichon has been Artistic and Principal Conductor of the Orquesta FilarmΓ³nica de Gran Canaria since May 2017, a position renewed three times through to the 2026-2027 season. Under his leadership, the OFGC has reached important artistic heights and strengthened its recording profile, becoming the only Spanish orchestra currently recording with Deutsche Grammophon. For the prestigious German label he has conducted the albums Sol y Vida, with Elina Garanca, and Arias, with Jonathan Tetelman, the latter honoured with the Best Solo Album award at the Oper! Awards 2023 and included among the best new recordings by Gramophone, The New York Times and Die Presse, as well as receiving a nomination at the International Opera Awards.

He was previously, in order, Principal Conductor of the Graz Symphony Orchestra in Austria (2006-2009), Principal and Artistic Conductor of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra (2009-2012) and Principal Conductor of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie SaarbrΓΌcken Kaiserslautern (2011-2017). With the latter he was recognised for his interpretations and his innovative work with the orchestra, and recorded for HΓ€nssler Classics the first three volumes of the complete orchestral works of DvoΕ™Γ‘k, received with great critical acclaim. He has conducted the ensembles of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Vienna State Opera, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Deutsche Oper, the Bavarian State Opera, the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, as well as ensembles including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the London Symphony, the Vienna Symphony and the NHK Symphony of Tokyo. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2016 with Madama Butterfly, broadcast live to 2,000 cinemas in 66 countries. Since then he has returned regularly to the New York opera house, where he has conducted La Traviata and Rigoletto, and in the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons he assumed and will assume, respectively, the musical direction of La BohΓ¨me and Tosca. Between 2006 and 2010 he was Music Director of the “Christmas in Vienna” concerts, televised to millions of viewers. He is also a regular Deutsche Grammophon artist, for whom he has made numerous recordings.

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