– The Asturian conductor, with an ever-rising international career, will appear in November at the Basel Opera in Switzerland with Barbieri’s popular zarzuela in the production staged by Christof Loy.
Asturian conductor Julio César Picos joins the unprecedented success achieved in Switzerland with a zarzuela title: since the production of El barberillo de Lavapiés, staged by Christof Loy, premiered in September at the Theater Basel, word of mouth has caused all scheduled performances to sell out. The last three performances, on November 28th and December 7th and 28th, will mark the Asturian maestro’s debut on the podium of the Swiss theater.
“It is impressive to witness the triumph of this magnificent production of El barberillo de Lavapiés in Switzerland,”, confesses the Spanish conductor Julio César Picos; “taking the zarzuela to this city for the first time has been wonderful, and it couldn’t have been under better conditions: with top-level soloists, stage direction by one of the greats—the German Christof Loy, with his zarzuela company Los Paladines—and an exceptional orchestra and choir under the baton of the Madrid-born maestro José Miguel Pérez-Sierra,”, with whom Julio César Picos has grown professionally and has collaborated regularly since they met in 2007 in Oviedo, with El Rey que rabió by Chapí. “I am happy to be part of this splendid team with which we are taking the zarzuela genre beyond our borders,” confesses the maestro, who throughout his career has had a close relationship with the Hispanic repertoire, collaborating with, among others, the Festival de Teatro Lírico Español in Oviedo. Maestro Picos praises the point of view proposed in the production he will conduct in Basel: “Christof Loy, with his expert vision and great respect and enthusiasm for zarzuela, adds a new emotional twist to the characters, and as a result offers a luminous, intelligently crafted and renewed proposal; from a musical point of view, it has been a luxury once again to work with Maestro Pérez-Sierra, with whom I share, besides friendship, the same vision of orchestral direction.”
A trained pianist, Julio César Picos made his opera debut in December 2019 with Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania (Italy), after several seasons—since 2001—as a rehearsal pianist at the Teatro Campoamor in Oviedo, where he immersed himself in the craft of orchestral direction alongside great maestros, so that almost naturally he ended up stepping onto the podium, first and from 2013, as an assistant conductor in rehearsals and later leading performances of both zarzuelas and operas.
He recently conducted La tabernera del puerto at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid, a title he took last August to the 58th Jan Kiepura Festival, held in Krynica-Zdrój (Poland); after El barberillo de Lavapiés at the Theater Basel, he looks forward “with great enthusiasm” to taking on the direction of the Madrid coliseum’s Zarza outreach project with Bohemios, by Amadeo Vives: “Making well-crafted zarzuela by and for young people, with a high level of quality, is the best thing that could happen to the genre, a success from Daniel Bianco’s tenure at the helm of the theatre that is essential to maintain, as the current director, Isamay Benavente, is doing,”he points out.