We left at the interval...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday December 18 2022 Conductor: Bassem Akiki. Production: Richard Brunel. Sets: Etienne Pluss. Costumes: Bruno de Lavenère. Lighting: Laurent Castaingt. Bastien Follavoine: Jean-Sébastien Bou. Julie Follavoine: Jodie Devos. Aristide Chouilloux: Denzil Delaere. Clémence Chouilloux: Sophie Pondjiclis. Horace Truchet: Jérôme Varnier. Toto: Tibor Ockenfels. Toto (as a child): Martin da Silva Magalhães. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. Photos: Jean-Louis Fernandez/La Monnaie My 2022 operatic agenda ended with  On purge bébé , Philippe Boesmans' eighth and last opera (completed after his death in 2021 by his friend Benoît Mernier, with advice from Sylvain Cambreling), at La Monnaie in Brussels: an hour and twenty minutes of sheer, scatological fun, revolving around the enfant roi Toto’s constipation (Toto, short for Hervé we are told, is, by the way, actually seven, not a toddler), a contract for 300,000 chamber pots, and of course (the vaudeville is by Feydeau, ...

 

Opéra Magazine 's December 2022 pick of the month in its recordings listings, with the publication's highest 'Diamond' accolade, is John Nelson's Berlioz CD pairing Les Nuits d'Eté by Michael Spyres with Harold en Italie , on Erato. 'Dazzling Berlioz,' says the reviewer (in French, of course). 'Taking up the challenge of the complete Nuits d'Eté , Michael Spyres climbs to the summits, with the complicity of John Nelson.'  On YouTube (at the time of writing, at least), the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg offers the whole CD in a playlist.