Plenilunio - Redes de Pasion

Soprano Eladia Roberta Welch-Marchetti Luna, soprano and lyricist, has performed opera, zarzuela, and songs of Latin America, Spain, France, and Italy in the United States and in Mexico. The daughter of an opera singer, she began music and dance lessons at an early age at the Conservatorio Nacional de Panamá. Her first teacher and major influence in the Bel Canto vocal technique and operatic repertoire was her mother, coloratura soprano Dorotea Marchetti, who encouraged her to pursue formal voice studies, at the age of seventeen, with Maestro Renato del Giudice in Napoli. She later completed her B.A. degree in Spanish and Voice (Opera) at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Luna sang several seasons with the Opera Workshop at UNM, and was dialogue coach and performed with ¡Viva Zarzuela! In Albuquerque and at the International Zarzuela Festival at the Chamizal Theater in El Paso, Texas. Luna's father was a linguist, amateur singer and bass player who loved the popular, traditional, and folkloric music of Latin America and Spain. From her childhood roots in Panamá under his tutelage to the present, Luna has specialized in the vocal interpretation of this music. She was influenced profoundly by composers such as Agustín Lara, María Grever, Rafael Hernández, Ernesto Lecuona, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and singers, Lola Beltrán, Virginia López, Rosita Quintana, Bidu Sayâo, and Mercedes Sosa, to name just a few. Luna has performed in and directed Hispanic cultural programs, including performances of the traditional Mexican pageant, Las Posadas, on the television program Somos Bilingües en KOAT. She has performed with piano, orchestra, guitar trio, conjunto, folkloric and Mariachi accompaniment in a wide variety of Latin musical styles. In addition to living in Panamá, Italy, and Eritrea with her parents, Luna lived, sang, and wrote in Mexico for four and a half years where she received critical acclaim for her vocal performances, as well as, her poems and short stories. She sang with Marta Muñoz and Carlos Lago, and with the folkloric group, Kiacalli, as well as with Brazilian guitarist, Rubém Hofliger. She performed at the Casa del Artista on the Island of the Rio Cuale and for the Puerto Vallarta Cultural Program where she debuted two original songs, Canción del mar and Amame, written in collaboration with Herrera-Alvarez. Baritone José Daniel Apodaca's earliest childhood recollections from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Northern New Mexico were the sounds of music and the impact it had on his life and the lives of his family. His parents, Max and Antonia Apodaca, were recognized experts in the field of New Mexico colonial music, who carried forward the vocal and instrumental traditions of Hispanic folk music brought to the new world by Spanish colonists in the 16th and 17th centuries. From them and their participation in the social fabric of the community Apodaca learned how music creates moments when time and mundane life stops, how music, as art and as ritual, clears a space for the celebration of life and for the understanding of human interconnectedness. As a young man, his skills as a singer brought him numerous awards on local, regional, state, and national levels. Included in these awards was his selection to an all nation select choral group, Young Americans in Concert, that traveled and performed in the US and Europe including performances at Carnegie Hall, Constitution Hall, the White House, and major concert halls in Europe. He also toured the USA, Africa, and Europe as a member of Up With People. While at Stanford University, he sang with the Stanford University Concert Chorus in performances with the San Francisco Symphony in Mahler's 8th Symphony under Segei Ozawa. Apodaca has toured the southeastern USA with Fegan Attractions, California with Stanford Medicants, southwestern USA with ¡Viva Zarzuela!, Santa Fe Opera Guild, and La Compañía. His travels have exposed him to people of the most varied kind: US presidents, royal families of Belgium and Spain, the poor of the Bronx and Harlem, and peasants in Portugal and Ireland. He returned to his roots in New Mexico so that he could promote Hispanic music and become an active force working with young Hispanics in the region. At the University of New Mexico (UNM), he focused on the zarzuela genre in the music department as a teacher of singing and also as a student in a Master's of Music program. He founded the zarzuela company, ¡Viva Zarzuela!, composed of professionals, semi-professionals, and students. This company won numerous awards and recognition from the government of Spain, the New Mexico Arts Division, and the University of New Mexico and participated annually in regional Hispanic festivals, including the Chamizal International Zarzuela Festival in El Paso, Texas. Apodaca's operatic roles have included Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro, Papageno in The Magic Flute, Herr Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Morales in Carmen, El Don Cairo in Carmen, and Page in Ahmahl and the Night Visitors. His zarzuela roles have included El Maestro in En las Astas del Toro, Julian in La Verbena de la Paloma, Barbero in El Barberillo de Lavapiés, Felipe in La Revoltosa, Vidal in Luisa Fernanda, and numerous concerts of zarzuela anthologies with other artists. His solo performances in oratorios and masses have included Elijah by Mendelssohn, Handel's Messiah, The Seven Last Words of Christ by Dubois, Christmas Oratorio by Saint-Saëns, The Creation by Haydn, Fauré's Requiem, and Mozart's Requiem. Composer Marni Elci grew up in a family that loved music. She has been strongly influenced by the Sephardic, Ladino, and eastern European music of her childhood, by the classical pieces that her parents loved, and by middle eastern music, which she came to appreciate more fully when she met and married a Turkish scientist. Her family is actively involved in making music -- both her uncles are cantors, one aunt is an opera singer, and one cousin is a well-known singer/songwriter. At four or so, Elci became enchanted by the piano in her aunt's house. She studied theory with Charles Weiss, an early partner of Burt Bacharach, who introduced her to an understanding and love of baroque music and encouraged her to compose. As a teen, she idolized Joan Baez, taught herself to play the guitar, and began writing and singing songs. She briefly sang with a rock band, but soon decided to move on to a different style of music. Elci has always loved foreign languages and cultures. She has her master's in English as a Second Language (ESL) education and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she teaches at a community college. There she met fellow teacher and bilingual poet Eladia Luna, with whom she began writing songs in Spanish. Elci and her husband are avid Latin and ballroom dancers, so when she discovered that Spanish was perfect for the kind of music she likes to write - sensitive, dramatic, passionate - she took care to create songs that are danceable. Some of her favorite singer-songwriters are Chayanne, Shakira, Marc Anthony, and Juanes.

1) Obsesionada
2) La Canci;#243;N Del Universo
3) Porque Me Gusta
4) ;#191;D;#243;Nde?
5) Enga;#241;O Fatal
6) Eres la Flor
7) ;#161;Hablame Claro!
8) Nocturno Arabesco
9) También los Claveles
10) Creo
11) ;#161;El Mamborrico!
12) Suéltame