We left at the interval...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 28 2026 Conductor: Jordan de Souza. Production & costumes: Rafael R. Villalobos. Sets: Emanuele Sinisi. Lighting: Felipe Ramos. Paintings: Santiago Ydáñez. Floria Tosca: Leah Hawkins. Mario Cavaradossi: Stefano La Colla. Il barone Scarpia: Lucio Gallo. Cesare Angelotti: Li Huanhong. Il sagrestano: Paolo Orecchia. Spoletta: Trystan Llŷr Griffiths. Sciarrone: Kamil Ben Hsaïn Lachiri. Un pastore: Pieter De Praetere. Un carceriere: René Laryea. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie. Photos: Pieter Claes, Karl Forster My last opera of the 25-26 season - assuming Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe in Pesaro this coming August doesn’t count - was Rafael R. Villalobos’s production of Tosca , in Brussels. This isn’t new at La Monnaie, but when it first appeared there in 2021 it was - like this season’s Norma  as well - severely hit by Covid restrictions, and so attended by only a few. I’d previously only seen the director’s Hänsel und Gretel , or in this...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday May 17 2026 Conductor: Michiel Delanghe. Libretto and production: Lydia Steier. Sets: Flurin Borg Madsen. Costumes: Katharina Schlipf. Lighting: Elana Siberski. Medusa: Claudia Boyle. Euryale: Paula Murrihy. Stheno: Angela Denoke. Perseus: Josh Lovell. Poseidon: Konstantin Gorny. Athena: Mary Elizabeth Williams. High Priestess: Anu Komsi. Danaë: Marie-Juliette Ghazarian. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie. Photos: © Simon Van Rompay   I’m going to waffle a bit at the start of this post. If you just want to know about the production or the singing and playing, skip or scroll down…’  I remember once, when I was a kid in England, there was some Beethoven on the radio; piano music, probably a concerto, and at one point, perhaps during a cadenza, Beethoven stripped the score right down to single notes played with one finger. ‘That’s not very hard,’ said my mother, drying a dish. Clearly, Beethoven needed to pull his socks up. A friend of mine, an amateu...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday March 22 2026 Conductor: Enrico Onofri. Production: Calixto Bieito. Sets: Anna-Sofia Kirsch. Costumes: Paula Kleiné. Lighting: Reinhard Traub/Calixto Bieito. Vidéo: Adrià Reixach. Idomeneo: Joshua Stewart. Idamante: Gaëlle Arquez. Ilia: Shira Patchornik. Elettra: Kathryn Lewek. Gran Sacerdote di Nettuno: Michael J. Scott. La Voce: Frederic Jost. Cretesi e Troiani: Manon Poskin, Nadiia Lys, Taeksung Kwon, Byoungjin Lee. Orchestra and chorus of La Monnaie. Photos: © S. Van Rompay/La Monnaie Calixto Bieito is, so I read, well pleased with how his production of Idomeneo (a co-production with the State Opera in Prague, where it premiered last year), turned out: a dream. His intention, so I also read, was to approach the work as a psychological study of the traumatic after-effects of war on those who’ve waged it, and on their relationships with their family and entourage. The backdrop to this mental landscape, meanwhile, is a fluctuating memory of the sea, where...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday February 08 2026 Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production and sets: Thaddeus Strassberger. Costumes: Giuseppe Palella. Lighting: Driscoll Otto. Videos: Greg Emetaz. Benvenuto Cellini: John Osborn. Giacomo Balducci: Tijl Faveyts. Fieramosca: Jean-Sébastien Bou. Le Pape Clément VII: Ante Jerkunica. Francesco: Luis Aguilar. Bernardino: Leander Carlier. Pompeo: Gabriele Nani. Cabaretier: Yves Saelens. Teresa: Ruth Iniesta. Ascanio: Florence Losseau. La Monnaie Orchestra and Chorus. La Monnaie youth choir. Photos: Simon Van Rompay/La Monnaie The last time I saw Benevenuto Cellini , it was in Terry Gilliam’s production at the Bastille , in 2018. It was busy. I quote: ‘For the first time ever in my opera-going career, as far as I can remember, I had the unlikely and illogical feeling that the music was drowned in the action, crowded out, overwhelmed…’ In other words, it was ‘Hugely busy, overwhelmingly and distractingly and unnecessarily busy, like some gigantic, hi...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday December 28 2025 Conductor: George Petrou. Production: Christophe Coppens. Sets: Christophe Coppens & I.S.M.Architecten. Lighting: Peter Van Praet. Video: Supersauce - Georgie Pin. Pollione: Enea Scala. Oroveso: Alexander Vinogradov. Norma: Sally Matthews. Adalgisa: Raffaella Lupinacci. Clotilde: Lisa Willems. Flavio: Alexander Marev. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie. Photos: Simon Van Rompay This production of Norma at La Monnaie is one that was hit, like many at the time, by Covid. When it was performed in front of an audience, in December 2021, vaccination certificates and masks were required, strict social distancing was in force, and few people could, as a result, actually get seats. (As I remember, in Belgium, the maximum audience per house was set at 200.) It was streamed instead. Now it’s back, with much the same cast - and no pandemic. Sally Matthews is a regular at La Monnaie, and La Monnaie is where I’ve always seen her, except for the...

La Monnaie at Bozar, Brussels, Sunday October 19 2025 Conductor: Dmitry Matvienko. Mezzo-soprano: Olesya Petrova. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra. Photos: credits not found Mussorgsky: A Night on the Bare Mountain , orch. Rimsky-Korsakov. Mussorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death , orch. Shostakovich. Shostakovich: Symphony N°5.  In the last few years, La Monnaie has got into the habit of including a concert in its Sunday matinee subscription series - probably, as times are hard, to save money. But now that Alain Altinoglu has hoisted the house orchestra to unanticipated heights, these concerts have actually become something of an event: quite often, they turn out to be memorable, well worth the trip to Brussels. Sunday's programme of Mussorgsky and Shostakovich involved two names new to me. Timur Zangiev, who conducted Tsar Saltan at La Monnaie in 2023 , had to cancel ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances'. (Visa issues, I heard, though that seems odd when he's been allowed in bef...

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 15 2025 Conductor: Nathalie Stutzmann. Production, sets and dialogues: Dmitri Tcherniakov. Costumes: Elena Zaitseva. Lighting: Gleb Filshtinsky. Carmen: Stéphanie d’Oustrac. Don José: Attilio Glaser. Micaëla: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Escamillo: Edwin Crossley-Mercer. Zuniga: Christian Helmer. Moralès: Pierre Doyen. Frasquita: Louise Foor. Mercédès: Claire Péron. Le Dancaïre: Guillaume Andrieux. Le Remendado: Enguerrand De Hys. L’administrateur: Pierre Grammont. La Monnaie Orchestra, Chorus, Youth and Children’s Choirs. Photos: © Bernd Uhlig La Monnaie’s new Carmen was originally staged in Aix in 2017. Like thousands of others, I saw it on video afterwards, and though I was impressed by Michael Fabiano’s fervent commitment to Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production concept, otherwise didn’t enjoy it much. I was bored by the unchanging set, and, though I’d found it intriguing when it was a novelty in 2012 , a bit fed up, thirteen years and several productions...