André Lousada Makes His Óbidos Opera Festival Debut with the Portuguese Academic Philharmonic Orchestra in Café Europa
Café Europa in Óbidos
In September 2025, the medieval town of Óbidos once again becomes a meeting point for music and thought during the Óbidos Opera Festival. This year’s edition carries a particular anticipation: the debut of conductor André Lousada with the Orquestra Académica Filarmónica Portuguesa, presenting the contemporary opera Café Europa.
Set for 17 September 2025 at the evocatively named Praça da Criatividade, the performance promises more than music—it offers a reflection on Europe itself.
A Café as a Stage for Europe
Café Europa, composed by Christoph Renhart with a libretto inspired by Between Memories by Alexandre Honrado, unfolds not in palaces or mythic landscapes, but at a café table. It is here—amid conversation, disagreement, tragedy, and silence—that Europe is examined and questioned.
Honrado’s concept frames the café as a microcosm of the continent: a place where ideas are served, shared, contested, and sometimes left unfinished. The audience is invited, metaphorically, to “ask for the menu”— to taste not only what is presented, but to return, again and again, in search of deeper understanding.
At a time when Europe stands at a crossroads of identity and memory, Café Europa becomes both a stage and a mirror.
A Cast of Voices, A Chorus of Ideas
The opera’s characters—part myth, part archetype, part everyday observer—are brought to life by an international cast:
Mae Heydorn, Mezzo-soprano as Europa, embodying both vulnerability and resilience
Harald Hieronymus Hein, Baritone, as Zeus, a figure of power and ambiguity
Antoin Herrera-Lopez Kessel, Baritone, as the philosophers and café visitors, representing the many voices of public discourse
Antonio Signorello, Tenor, and Chloé Leruth, Soprano, as the two ghosts, echoing memory, history, and unresolved pasts
Together, they form a living dialogue—where myth meets modernity, and where every voice contributes to the ongoing question: What is Europe today?
“A Europa chegou a um ponto da sua longa história em que todas as reflexões podem ser úteis. Deve discutir-se nos grandes palcos ou no palco modesto das emoções intensas, como é, afinal, o da mesa do café, onde a prosa, a amizade, o contraditório, dão vida aos mais indiferentes. (…)
Peça a ementa no Café Europa. O que lhe servirem pode ser a sua vontade de voltar à mesa, para descobrir o paladar de novas e melhores ideias e ideais.”
Alexandre Honrado
Returning to the Table
“Peça a ementa no Café Europa,” writes Alexandre Honrado. Ask for the menu. What is served may awaken the desire to return—to sit again, to think again, to imagine better ideas and ideals.
In Óbidos, on a September afternoon, opera becomes exactly that: not an escape from reality, but a return to it—richer, more complex, and shared.
And at the center of it all stands André Lousada, making his debut not just as a conductor, but as a guide through one of the most pressing conversations of our time.
