On 17 February, Alain Altinoglu and the La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra will perform the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven during the third concert of our Beethoven cycle.
La Monnaie invited the Belgian composer Wim Henderickx to compose an original piece inspired by Beethoven’s work.
His harp concerto ‘… after a soft Silence, an enormous Thunder …’ will be performed for the first time with Agnès Clément as soloist.
The soprano Véronique Gens is a regular on our stage. She made her debut here as Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni) and then performed Iphigénie (Iphigénie en Aulide), Roi Gaële (Alceste), Vitellia (La clemenza di Tito) and, most recently, Madame Lidoine (Dialogues des Carmélites). She is also a passionate interpreter of French mélodie.
La Gioconda is one of those forgotten nineteenth century masterpieces: a grand drama with six leading roles, huge choral parts and a spectacular ballet... La Monnaie brings this all too rarely performed jewel of Italian ‘grande opera’. Not to be missed!
On 6 January, Alain Altinoglu and the La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra will perform the Second and Fourth Symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven during the second concert of our Beethoven cycle. La Monnaie invited the Spanish composer Mauricio Sotelo to compose an original piece inspired by Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. His clarinet concerto L’angelo necessario will be performed for the first time with Antonio Capolupo as soloist.
The economy of means employed to tell a story that gets straight to the point
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.
‘Don Pasquale’ is the ideal opera for the holiday season. Let our dramaturge Marie Mergeay convince you to come see the show.
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.
Janáček had a whole new opera concept in mind.
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.
Nous, on veut chanter !
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.
Reinder Pols, dramaturge at La Monnaie, gets into the details of From the house of the dead, Leoš Janáček's last opera, a work that hovers between operatic tradition and early 20th-century innovation.
We are no longer divas.
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.