The ballet, scheduled to make its premiere on April 11 and stage for three other consecutive evenings, will bring on stage soloist Enada Hoxha and Gerd Vaso performing a young couple in love but unable to live together
TIRANA, April 2 – Albania youth in the early 1970s when a kind of western liberalism emerged during the communist regime will come in a revised ballet 42 years after its premiere at the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Tirana when it received strong criticism by the hard-line communist authorities.
Titled “The story of a song” the ballet with music by Nikolla Zoraqi, and libretti by Agron Aliaj, the ballet bringing back Albanian youth in the early 1970s will make its comeback under a review by Zhani Ciko, the director of the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet. The ballet, scheduled to make its premiere on April 11 and stage for three other consecutive evenings, will bring on stage soloist Enada Hoxha and Gerd Vaso performing a young couple in love but unable to live together. For 45 minutes time will turn back 40 years ago when Albanian youth started being influenced by western music and style labeled as imperialist by the communists.
Songs by the Beatles, Adriano Celentano, Tom Jones and Elvis Presley, widely popular even among Albania youth at that time, will accompany the ballet. Staged in May 1971 the opera warned of the massive punishments in the 11th national song festival in December 1972 whose organizers and several singers were sentenced to imprisonment for their unacceptable western trends.
The ballet comes just after the premiere of Ali Pascha von Janina” a single-act opera by German composer Gustav Albert Lortzing dedicated to the early 19th century Albanian ruler of Ioannina and Verdi’s La Traviata brought as ballet on the composer’s 200th birth anniversary.
