"It's about nothing, and yet it's about everything. It's about life and death, it's about love and social hierarchy..." In the run-up to their fourth collaboration at La Monnaie, we sat down with Alain Altinoglu and Laurent Pelly — a conductor with a unique theatrical feeling, a director who knows how to "stage" music.
With his debut in the role of the charming and reluctant anti-hero Yevgeny Onegin, the French baritone sets himself new challenges.
A love story that is not actually a love story, spleen and ennui, grand balls, passionate impulses, a duel in the mist and intoxicating melodies... All the ingredients of a real Tchaikovsky masterpiece. Read the synopsis of Yevgeny Onegin here, along with the opera's musical highlights provided and discussed by conductor Alain Altinoglu.
In addition to composing some of the most popular works in the whole history of music, Tchaikovsky was an assiduous correspondent. His letters on Yevgeny Onegin reveal a perfectionist artist who was searching for lyrical innovation and marked by his own tumultuous emotional life...
In January, director Laurent Pelly returns to la Monnaie for a new production of Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin. It marks his fifth visit to our house, after Don Quichotte (2010), Cendrillon (2011), The Golden Cockerel (2016) and Don Pasquale (2018), who all met with critical and public acclaim. In this small documentary, we sit down with Laurent Pelly to look back on these beloved La Monnaie productions and to discuss the artistic credo that underpins them.
On the eve of the world premiere of On purge bébé !, conductor Bassem Akiki explores the humour and almost Mozartian accessibility of this contemporary score by Philippe Boesmans. Enjoy a glimpse of what this delightful holiday season comedy has to offer you.
An opera about unbreakable chamber pots and fragile family relationships, about straggly Scottish isles and shifty smiles, about how the greatest ambitions can end in the smallest room in the house.... Read the synopsis of On purge bébé !.
Get to know the man behind the opera composer Philippe Boesmans, through the testimonies of seven colleagues, friends and artists who were close to him.
“When staging a play by Feydeau, you only laugh the first three days”. Turns out that creating comedy is a serious business. A look behind the scenes of On purge bébé !, with director-librettist Richard Brunel and Mr. and Mrs. Follavoine: Jean-Sébastien Bou and Jodie Devos.
On purge bébé ! will be opera number 8.5 for Philippe Boesmans at La Monnaie. It crowns an artistic collaboration of just under forty years. A brief overview.
Der Rosenkavalier's most moving central theme sees its main character, the Marschallin, gradually giving up her relationship with her lover Octavian whom she relinquishes into the arms of a much younger (and in her eyes much more beautiful) woman. The opera raises a number of questions about how we relate as a society to age and femininity, and to its romantic and sexual issues…
In anticipation of Pinocchio, a team from La Monnaie followed the Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans for more than a year. Together, they took a look at his extraordinary career, from the very beginning in his home town, Tongeren, to the rehearsals for Pinocchio in Aix-en-Provence.
