Concert de l’Orchestre et des Chœurs de l’Opéra national de Paris  

Benjamin Britten composed The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 after a radio-drama by André Obey. Britten and his librettist, two convinced pacifists involved way before WWII, address a European society bruised by war and hate. Running from the grand operatic machine, their inspiration drove them to a more intimate construction, the chamber opera. Britten wrote indeed for a small number of musicians and singers-actors in a musical and dramatic language where the narration exceeds the illusion on stage.
Britten chose the myth of the dedicated and suicidal wife and wrote a piece that interrogates desire in its relation with anxiety: mutual love, gulty will and frustration. Britten makes us think about the violence in human relations, about sexuality and its dark zones. With Lucretia as heroin and victim, Britten makes us face the tragic human condition.

The musicians and members of the Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus are offering a series of lunchtime concerts preceded by an introductory meeting. The complete programme is available on the website at operadeparis.fr from September 1st onwards.    

“The subject for the Satin Slipper comes from a Chinese legend about two celestial stars in love who, each year, having travelled far, manage to come within reach of each other without ever being able to come together from the disparate sides of the Milky Way.” So surmised Paul Claudel. The play, whose power of attraction has never wavered, occupies a special place in the theatrical repertoire of the 20^th century: written between 1919 and 1924 and first staged by Jean-Louis Barrault in an abridged version in 1943, it would have to await Antoine Vitez to be performed in its entirety. That production, performed in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes in 1987, lasted over ten hours and marked an entire generation of theatregoers, including Marc-André Dalbavie.

Alternatively titled The Worst Is Not Always Certain, The Satin Slipper is an immense parable which alternates between the sublime, the comic and the disturbing. It is set in a specific era—the Spanish Golden Age—during which humanity experiences its first bout of “globalization”. Confronting a passionate desire for individual happiness, external imperatives and an aspiration for the universal, the work leads the spectator into a ongoing state hovering between hypnosis and joy. This new opera is the third world-premiere production commissioned by the Paris Opera for its cycle on French literature.

Two obsessions can no more exist in the same mind than two bodies in the

same space", wrote Pushkin in "The Queen of Spades" in 1834. A

story in which the young Hermann, eager for social ascension, is obsessed by a

magic formula in the possession of an old countess. To obtain this formula that

would enable him to win at cards, he sacrifices his love for Lisa.

Tchaikovsky's opera of 1890 paints a bitter portrait of the generation of the

final years of Tsarist Russia. Saint Petersburg's streets, embankments and

balls surge out from a score that deliberately seeks to recreate eighteenth-century

musical forms, yet sacrifices nothing to the fervent lyricism so distinctive of

Tchaikovsky's music. This evocation of a far northern city, cut off from the

land and, hence, from reason, might also be seen as a portrait of the composer.

Lev Dodin underlines this notion of loss of reason by setting the characters in

an asylum where ghostly visions haunt lost souls as obsessively as the three

winning cards "three, seven, ace" that echo in Hermann's mind.

Looking for the melody that makes her fall asleep, Irène meets the two archivists Michel and Michel whose job is to keep all the melodies of the world safe in boxes. The musicians, Antonin Tri-Hoang, Jeanne Susin and Thibault Perriard, play the Russian matryoshka doll with several sounds in a staging between the dream and the absurb by Samuel Achache.

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28 May 2021 at 20:00
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“One of our own”, trained at the Paris Opera School of Dance, Roland Petit soon left the company to pursue his chosen pathway as a choreographer and performer. It was with his own company that he first enjoyed success and he did not return to the Paris Opera until 1955 and his premier production of Notre-Dame de Paris. There followed several years of unbroken collaboration, some of them stormy, with new works and new productions. To mark the tenth anniversary of his death, the Opera Ballet pays tribute to him with three of his mythical works: the sulphurous Carmen, the success of which in 1949 catapulted Roland Petit and Zizi Jeanmaire to international fame; Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, a disturbing duet imagined around a libretto by Jean Cocteau and Le Rendez-vous based on a text by Prévert, with sets by Brassaï that bring Fifties Paris back to life. Three works that testify to the choreographer's highly individual trademark: theatrical pieces constructed around literary characters, bringing together on the same stage some of the great artists of the period.

The musicians and members of the Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus are offering a series of lunchtime concerts preceded by an introductory meeting. The complete programme is available on the website at operadeparis.fr from September 1st onwards.    

Based on the eponymous play by Victorien Sardou, Puccini’s opera brings together all the elements of a melodrama: love, politics, violence and religion. Set against the backdrop of the struggle for Italian independence, Tosca is a tragic tale of thwarted love between a passionate, jealous and impulsive singer and a romantic, idealistic painter who champions civil liberties. In a period unsettled by the Battle of Marengo, which pits Napoléon Bonaparte’s French republican army against the Imperial army of the Holy Roman Empire, the terrible and manipulative chief of police Scarpia bargains with the singer: In exchange for spending one night alone with him, he will free her lover Mario. In order to escape his grasp, she murders him. However he will exact his revenge from beyond the grave.

In a landscape reminiscent of Pasolini, the crushing shadow of a cross hovers above everyone, representing colluding political and religious oppression. Through the ubiquitous presence of religious references in both private and public spaces alike, director Pierre Audi’s interpretation skilfully sets out the dramatic lines of the narrative.

In this production created for the Opera Ballet in 1984, Rudolf Nureyev opted for powerful dramatization. Splendour and violence, truculence and beauty mingle, rekindling the passion of Shakespeare’s drama. Scrupulously adhering to Prokofiev’s score, itself very close to the play, the choreographer produced a version of Romeo and Juliet in which “the young boy becomes a man” opposite a passionate Juliet who, barely out of childhood, also tragically enters womanhood. Their love cannot be openly declared, as their respective families, the Montagues and the Capulets, are locked into an ancestral feud... Inspired by the Italian Renaissance, the sumptuous sets and costumes by Ezio Frigerio and Mauro Pagano transport us to a painstakingly recreated Verona.

The musicians and members of the Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus are offering a series of lunchtime concerts preceded by an introductory meeting. The complete programme is available on the website at operadeparis.fr from September 1st onwards.    

Chamber music concerts by musicians of the Paris Opera Orchestra    

Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris
Gala in support of the Paris Opera activities
A unique program to support the creation at the Opéra national de Paris.”  

For his residency as stage director at the Academy, Simon Valastro will build a staging workshop with scenes taken from Perrault and Grimm’s tales which stories inspired composers such as Rossini and Massenet (Cenerentola) and Humperdinck (Hänsel und Gretel). In these colourful musical landscape, Cenerentola, Hänsel and Gretel, unconscious but supported by their good fairies and preceptors, find their ways to recognition and happiness facing danger. How does music express what the texts could not? How to tell and put on the stage the strength of enchantment of these three musical tales?   

Concert de l’Orchestre et des Chœurs de l’Opéra national de Paris  

Inaugurated in 1990, the “Jeunes danseurs” performances are the occasion for some of the young dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet to shine on the Garnier’s stage, performing roles traditionally danced by Etoiles dancers. For this new edition, the rising generation of the Ballet performs great classics (Noureev, Bournonville, Vainonen) as well as pas de deux by contemporary choreographers currently entering the repertoire (Preljocaj, Øyen, Wheeldon, Favier, Brumachon).