Spanish soprano Laura Alonso won ecstatic applause at an iconic church in Panama City where she sang in the Giacomo Puccini opera “Suor Angelica,” which she dedicated to the victims of the “terrible attack” in Nice.
The Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the capital’s financial center was the scene of the Puccini opera about a nun who lived her life enclosed in an Italian convent, a setting described as “incomparable” by Alonso, who sang the leading role.
The audience was immensely impressed by her performance and rewarded it with a long ovation.
In the one-act work, organized by the Panama Opera Foundation, Alonso was accompanied by a chorus of Panamanian and Mexican singers, and an orchestra under the baton of Brazilian conductor Linus Lerner, as well as by Italo-American maestro Roberto Desimone.
The Spanish soprano, 40, a native of Villagarcia de Arosa in Galicia, studied music at the prestigious Musikhochschule of Karlsruhe, Germany, where she has lived for the past 20 years.
Winner of the famous Alfredo Kraus International Singing Competition, Alonso has recently been on a tour of Japan, China, Thailand and Egypt, where she sang in the concert staged by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra last Easter Week.
As for the massacre in France by a truck driver who ran over crowds of people and left more than 80 dead, Alonso told EFE she believes that “all we can do is keep going forward and build a united Europe, though you can see it will be hard.”
The Spanish soprano recalled that she was at the airport in Istanbul several hours before the recent attack in that city, which made her think that “these days unfortunately no one can be safe anywhere,” but added that “we have to stay united against terror. It’s very ugly to talk about terror, but I believe all we can do is stay united.”
The opera singer said that in the coming days she will take the stage in Spain as the soprano in “La Voix Humaine,” a dramatic work by Francis Poulenc, which she says is an even more challenging role than she sang in “Suor Angelica.” EFE