We left at the interval...

ONP Garnier, Paris, Wednesday March 26, 2025 Conductor: Kent Nagano. Production: Claus Guth. Sets: Étienne Pluss. Costumes: Gesine Völlm. Lighting: Fabrice Kebour. Video: Roland Horvath/rocafilm. Electroacoustics: Thierry Coduys. Dante: Bo Skovhus. Virgilio: David Leigh. Giovane Dante: Christel Loetzsch. Beatrice: Jennifer France. Lucia: Danae Kontora. Voce dei dannati: Dominique Visse. Narratore: Giovanni Battista Parodi. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Photos: © Bernd Uhlig/Opéra National de Paris Pascal Dusapin is probably better known in France and Belgium than elsewhere, though his Faustus, the Last Night (2006) premiered in Berlin. But like me, he’s getting on for 70, and Il Viaggio, Dante , first performed at the Aix festival, in the summer of 2022, is something like his tenth opera, depending on how you classify his works: he apparently calls this one an ‘operatorio’. It’s the fourth I’ve seen, and browsing back through my posts, I find that various th...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday April 12 2015 Conductor: Franck Ollu. Production: Pierre Audi. Sets: Berlinde De Bruyckere. Lighting: Jean Kalman. Costumes: Wojciech Dziedzic. Video: Mirjam Devriendt. Electro-acoustic emplacement: Thierry Coduys. Penthesilea: Natascha Petrinsky. Prothoe: Marisol Montalvo. Achilles: Georg Nigl. Odysseus: Werner Van Mechelen. Oberpriesterin: Eve-Maud Hubeaux. Bote: Wiard Witholt. Botin: Yaroslava Kozina. Amazone: Marta Beretta. La Monnaie Orchestra & Chorus. Before seeing this opera, I had no idea of the gruesome tale (as retold by Kleist) of Penthesilea . Here are some indications from the web… First, very simply, from encyclopedia.com : “ Penthesilea is about an Amazon queen who falls in love with the Greek hero Achilles but later goes mad with passion and kills him”. Wikipedia hints at the gruesomeness: “ Penthesilea (1808) is a tragedy by the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist about the mythological Amazon queen, Penth...

Opéra Comique, Tuesday April 29 2008 Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production: Ludovic Lagarde. Costumes: Christian Lacroix. Lighting: Sébastien Michaud. Roméo 1: Jean-Sébastien Bou. Roméo 2: Marc Mauillon. Juliette 1: Karen Vourc'h. Juliette 2: Amaya Dominguez. Bill: Laurent Poitrenaux. Vocal Quartet: Caroline Chassany, Valérie Rio, Jean-Paul Bonnevalle, Paul-Alexandre Dubois. Solo clarinet: Philippe Berrod. Accentus choir. Orchestre de Paris. Sound engineering: Ircam. " It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes ." That alleged Beecham quote came to mind as I sat through Pascal Dusapin's Roméo et Juliette the other evening. I hadn't the faintest idea what the text was about or what, if anything, was supposed to be going on, but as is often the case with contemporary music, I was loving the noise it made. In any case I'm not really an ideas person and the kind of ...