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For the 2017-2018 season, the Academy is giving carte blanche to its young director in residence, Paul Balgué, to present a workshop on American opera from the second half of the 20th century. Structured around the emblematic figures of American music like Leonard Bernstein with Trouble in Tahiti, Aaron Copland in The Tender Land, Samuel Barber with Vanessa as well as works by Carlysle Floyd and the celebrated songs of George Gershwin, the workshop unveils fifty years of musical creation and many attempts to renew operatic form. An opportunity to mix genres and also to revisit the fundamental themes of the New World, the programme crystallises around the American Dream and its opposite: Paradise Lost. Highly formative for young artists, this workshop will mark the culmination of the director’s time with the Paris Opera and testify to the work he has accomplished with the singers and instrumentalists of the Academy in the course of the year.

Bernstein, Barber, Floyd … A voyage through the United States of the second half of the 20th century, the American Dream and its opposite.