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Authors: Claudio Monteverdi and the Banquet Celestial

The place: Rome in 62 AD. Nero’s reign is at its peak in terms of decadence and cruelty. The emperor, after having his own mother, Agrippina, executed, manages to have the Empress Octavia (whom he will have assassinated a few months later) divorced in order to marry his mistress Poppea, not without having exiled the latter’s official lover, Otho, to Lusitania….

The characters

Nero: he is the figure of the ancient criminal par

L’Uomo Femina, Dijon auditorium, November 9, 2024

Today, we only really know the sonatas for harpsichord and a few concertos of the Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi. With nearly a hundred works in his catalog, he nevertheless dominated the Venetian lyric scene in the mid-18th century. Vincent Dumestre and the Poème harmonique are creating an event in Dijon by exhuming one of his missing scores and entrusting Agnès Jaoui with the visualization of a mischievously

The 23/24 season at the Opéra de Rennes opens with one of the major successes of the 2022 edition of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, a production of Claudio Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea by New York director Ted Huffman. It features Johannes Schütz’s Spartan set design (here revived and adapted by Anna Wörl), distinguished above all by the enormous tube – half black and half white – that hangs above the protagonists throughout the evening, like a symbol of the duality between good

La Traviata, Verdi’s masterpiece, is revived at the Opéra National de Toulouse in a colourful production by Pierre Rambert, conducted by Michele Spotti with a second cast led by Claudia Pavone, Julien Dran and Dario Solari.

The staging is as clear as ever, from the mundanity of Act I to the almost celestial bliss of the beginning of Act II, which is soon transformed into a descent into hell, literally: as the curtain closes on Act II, a spectre takes

Barrie Kosky’s ten years at the helm of the Komische Oper Berlin have left a legacy of unforgettable productions, some of which he directed. In France, therefore, we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of all the productions from this recently ended era. His staging of Handel’s Sémélé (2018, seen streaming during the COVID months) lands at the Opéra de Lille, revived by David Merz, and it’s a complete strike!

Sémélé loves the god of gods Jupiter, who loves Sémélé. Semele is due

When the curtain rises, the drama has already been played out: all that remains of the beautiful, loving, naive Semele, the mythological figure and heroine of Georg Friedrich Handel’s oratorio, is a pile of smouldering ashes. Out of it suddenly emerges a dazed, incredulous young woman in a nightie. Locked in the vast room where she died, Sémélé, or rather her ghost, has no choice but to replay the events that led to her untimely death. Her forced betrothal

Sebastian Duron’s Coronis, a baroque zarzuela presented at the Théâtre de Caen from 6 to 9 November, in co-production with teams from Rouen, Limoges, Amiens, Lille and the Opéra Comique in Paris, is an exciting and, to put it bluntly, eminently bewitching discovery. This French premiere is also a stage premiere, since this mythological pastoral, first performed

György Ligeti died in 2006 and bequeathed to posterity a composite and peculiar musical body of work based notably on a complex polyphony, influenced by different ethnic music. His opera, Le Grand Macabre, belongs to the major lyrical works of the 20thcentury.

The Philharmonie de Paris was sold out for this exceptional evening dedicated to two of the central works of György Liegti, his deeply moving Requiem and his opera Le Grand Macabre through representative extracts of the latter. To see this vast enterprise

The work by Debussy is given at the Étoile du Nord theatre (Paris, 18thdistrict) in a shorter and reduced adaptation for chamber orchestra by Annelies Van Parys. The production exclusively brings young professionals together with a charming result. As dictated by the cuts made here and there, this version lasts for two hours. If we obviously particularly miss the disappearance of some pages like those of the cave, we are, however, wary of shouting too categorically that we have been betrayed by

That Lully’s Phaéton was an allusion to Fouquet’s fall, the minister guilty of having wanted to rise too closely to the Sun King, is possible, but for his production, Benjamin Lazar has chosen a totally different interpretation. This terrible story of all-consuming ambition could take place in any setting without losing any of its force, as we are shown by Mathieu Lorry-Dupuy’s sober and monumental set and Alain Blanchot’s costumes that deliberately mix periods and places. In this lyrical tragedy where the Lullyist art of

If live performance survives in spite of all the economic indicators, it is because, unlike any other genre – including cinema – it offers a part of the unexpected needed to experience a thrill. Take the Instant Lyrique with Anne-Catherine Gillet, a delightful soprano that Paris applauded last year in Le Domino Noir and Liège did a few weeks ago in Gounod’s Faust.

Couple her with a partner relatively unknown up to now as having only recently left the conservatoire: Victoire Bunel, a

In a few words, the conductor Jean-François Heisser situates the initiative behind this programme. In the context of his Society for Private Musical Performances founded in 1918, Schoenberg advocated the discovery of the contemporary repertoire by proposing an innovative approach whereby

The Opéra Royal de Versailles, in collaboration with Perm Opera, proposes the rare Phaéton by Lully in a scenic and musical version applauded for a long time by the public: a triumph not only for Vincent Dumestre and his troops but also for Benjamin Lazar. Errors excepted, Phaéton by Lully and Quinault (1683) had not been proposed in its stage version since the show by Karine Saporta put on in Lyon in 1993, with Les Musiciens du Louvre directed by Marc Minkowski. In concert