Introducing Salomón Zulic del Canto; Performing in double-bill in Coburg

Salomón Zulic del Canto in Riders to the Sea

Chilean barihunk Salomón Zulic del Canto is new to this site. He came to our attention as part of a double bill at the Coburg Landestheater where he will sing Aeneas in Purcell's Dido & Aeneas and Bartley in Ralph Vaughan Williams Riders to the Sea.  Performances are on November 17 and December 2 and tickets and cast information is available online.

Composed in 1927 but not premiered until December 1937, Riders to the Sea is based almost verbatim on J.M. Synge’s early twentieth­century drama of the same name. Music of eerie, elegiac beauty illuminates the theme of elemental and watery death as experienced by the Aran Islanders, west of Galway.

Salomón Zulic del Canto sings the role of Bartley, the youngest of Maurya's six sons, who becomes the sole support of the household after her other sons are lost at sea. He earns income by riding horses into the sea to the steamer anchored far offshore, so that they can be sold at the mainland fair. Preoccupied with practical exigencies, he ignores his mother’s request that he not go to sea. He nevertheless asks God’s blessing on the family and rides off on the red mare, leading the pony.

His mother foretells his death and omits the giving of a blessing to him, an omission considered bad luck. When his mother subsequently stands on the path trying in vain to say the blessing, he gives her his blessing. Bartley is knocked into the sea by his pony, becoming the sixth and final son of Maurya's to die at sea.

Salomón Zulic del Canto in Dido & Aeneas

Purcell's Dido & Aeneas is based on Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid. It recounts the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the Trojan hero Aeneas, and her despair when he abandons her. A monumental work in Baroque opera, Dido & Aeneas is remembered as one of Purcell's foremost theatrical works.

Salomón Zulic del Canto joined the ensemble at the Landestheater Coburg this season after two years as a member of the Thüringer Opera Studio. He studied at the Konservatorium der Universidad de Chile and continued his studies at the Musikhochschule Lübeck. As a student, he performed Demetrius in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Almaviva in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Marcello in Puccini’s La Bohème. He was a finalist in the “Felix Mendelssohn-Bartoldy Hochschulwettbewerb" 2014 in Berlin.

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Glen Seven Allen & Edwin Crossley-Mercer