LA MONNAIE / DE MUNT

The director Laurent Pelly returns to La Monnaie this December with Don Pasquale. We were able to interview him at the end of the summer, a few days before he left for Philadelphia where he presented a new production of Lucia di Lammermoor in September. A conversation devoted to Donizetti.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s music has made regular appearances in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's oeuvre. The Six Brandenburg Concerti marked her fifth performance to the music of the German baroque composer. Yet it was only in 1994, fourteen years after her first choreography Violin Phase, that she began to work with Bach's own music in the performance Toccata.

No right-minded person out alone on the street would wish to encounter the characters from From the house of the dead! And yet Janáček has the power to shine a light in the darkest corners of humanity with music that exudes intensity, vulnerability, power and humour. Conductor Michael Boder explains why Janáček’s last opera is so unusual.

The chorus leader of our social programme ‘A bridge between two worlds’ has devoted ten long years to sparking and escalating an enthusiasm for singing in inmates in several Belgian prisons. A conversation with a musical fire accelerant.

In his last great work, Janáček flatly ignored the basic rules of the theatre: From the House of the Dead is an opera without heroes. The piece is a montage of powerful dramatic scenes and narrations, in which each of the various protagonists in turn steps out of the anonymous male chorus to tell his tale. Sometimes that tale takes up a whole scene, sometimes the protagonist sings a single line. Separating the close on twenty (!) soloist roles poses a huge challenge for both the director and the spectator. It helps that in this labour camp, as in all dystopias, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. These five prisoners are most in the spotlight and they provide the spectator with a holdfast in the narrative.

La Monnaie opens the 2018-19 season with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s iconic opera ‘Die Zauberflöte’ in an original interpretation by Romeo Castellucci. The production boasts a five-star cast with, playing the part of the Queen of the Night, one of the leading European opera singers of the moment: Sabine Devieilhe, whose career we outline below.

For our production of ‘Die Zauberflöte’ – one of Mozart’s most famous works and one of the most beloved of the entire operatic repertoire –, director Romeo Castellucci asked the architect Michael Hansmeyer to design the set of the first act. Hansmeyer in turn collaborated with Factum Arte to create the gigantic architectural shapes he generated by algorithms.

On September 2^nd 2018, for the first time La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alain Altinoglu will accompany the French piano duo Katia and Marielle Labèque at the Centre for Fine Arts Brussels. A golden opportunity to take a look at the world of these two unclassifiable artists.

During the ‘Beethoven Overture’ concert, Alain Altinoglu will conduct one of the most iconic suites in Russian music. Pictures at an ‘Exhibition’ by Modest Mussorgsky is a musical stroll that harnesses the imaginative powers of La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and showcases its feel for colour and texture.   

“Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder”. The British tenor Mark Padmore opens the recital season at La Monnaie on September 24^th. Accompanied by pianist Simon Lepper, he will perform Robert Schumann’s ‘Kerner Lieder’ and Ludwig van Beethoven’s intimate cycle ‘An die ferne Geliebte’. Of all Beethoven’s works, it is his large-scale pieces for orchestra which tend to steal the limelight, but Mark Padmore shows how Beethoven was also a trailblazer in the Lied genre.

Creator of shows that, by their visual power, fascinate as much as they question, Romeo Castellucci is much in the public eye. At the beginning of the 2018-2019 season, he revisits for la Monnaie the famous opera ‘Die Zauberflöte’ by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The playwright Piersandra Di Matteo, one of his close collaborators, depicts the artist in the following portrait.

Having directed the successful Foxie! (The Cunning Little Vixen), the Belgian designer, artist and theatre director Christophe Coppens has taken on a second opera. Béla Bartók’s two most important works for the stage, Bluebeard’s Castle and The Miraculous Mandarin, take us into two totally different worlds. After a mysterious universe full of symbolism in Bluebeard’s Castle awaits the expressionism and even violence of The Miraculous Mandarin. Director Christophe Coppens talks to dramaturg Reinder Pols.