JUAN TRIGOS (b.1965): De Cachetito Raspado.

Description: DeCachetitoRaspado is an avant garde "opera" which blends disparate cultural origins including the Commedia dell'arte, Mexican popular culture and surrealism, imaginary meta-language à la James Joyce, popular dance forms, and gestures borrowed from the European avant garde. The absurdist plot, in the libretto by the composer’s father, a playwright, concerns a married couple who, permanently inebriated and high on drugs, are convinced that they are great actors, although their actual work is dubbing films, and that they are the parents of Siamese twins (who appear as a commenting chorus) although they are childless. The music is mostly not hard to listen to in the sense of dissonance or harshness of timbre, but its deliberately irritating repeated chanting and repetitive instrumental gestures seem more calculated to shock and confuse the audience than to entertain and enlighten them. In this sense, the work resembles the Dadaist anti-art movement, based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values, though without the overtones of political protest. Spanish-English libretto. Claudia Montiel (soprano), Mario Hoyos (tenor), Adriana Diaz de León (mezzo), Benito Navarro (baritone), La Camerata de las Américas; Juan Trigos.