LA MONNAIE / DE MUNT

At opera performances, he comes to greet the audience only at the beginning and the end, but during our concerts, Alain Altinoglu is the man front and centre. What exactly does a chief conductor do? What is he looking for in his musicians? And where does he want to take the orchestra? In this video he explains it himself.

"In my career, this is one of the projects that I have learned the most from." Meet The Woman! Mezzo-soprano Albane Carrère is almost ready to transform into the enigmatic leading lady in Is this the End?#2.

These days he is a two-time winner of Opernwelt’s award for ‘Opera Director of the Year’, but for the longest time, it didn’t look like Romeo Castellucci would tackle the art form at all. Until 2011, when La Monnaie invited him to work on Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. What followed is operatic history. In this video portrait, the director reveals his artistic credo and returns to his previous stagings at La Monnaie.

This April, La Monnaie will present the world premiere of Here's the Woman!, the second part of the opera trilogy Is this the End?. In order to explore this new creation in depth, we invited its three creators to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Discover here what they have in store for you with this new production!

In the run-up to the world premiere of Is this the End?#2, director Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski and videographer Jose Huedo also produced 5 interludes: intriguing teaser trailers that immerse you in the poetic universe of this new creation.

La Monnaie would like to dedicate this series of performances of the Requiem to Ukrainian citizens and children, victims of a ruthless aggressor intent on reducing a nation, a people, a tradition, a culture, a language and so much more to ‘nothingness’.

There’s the taste of America, and the taste of Scotland. There’s an almost tourist-board version of the green, pleasant land of Britain, and there’s the harsh war imagery of Britten’s Who are these children?. Stick with tenor Nicky Spence and pianist Dylan Perez, as they give some insights into their new recital programme, and the perils of not being able to wear wigs.

The set and costume designer Rainer Sellmaier gave each of the three operas in Il trittico its own aesthetic universe. In this video, he explains from the stage his specific approach to the neo-noir vibe in the first piece, Il tabarro.

In Il trittico, the poetic black-and-white imagery of video designer Manuel Braun offers the audience a unique glimpse behind the walls of the convent in Suor Angelica. As we follow him during the shoot at the La Cambre Abbey, he explains how he intends to enrich Puccini's opera with his video designs.

In between rehearsals for Il trittico, we asked director Tobias Kratzer for his take on each of the three Puccini operas, and how, in all their diversity, he still manages to link them to each other. "I'm not going to give away all the surprises, but..."

The brief contents of the three operas, summarised by stage director Tobias Kratzer.

Thirty-four years after he took care of the world premiere of Philippe Boesmans' Trakl-Lieder as music director of La Monnaie, Sylvain Cambreling puts this impressive song cycle back on our bill. Time to dig up these delightful archive images, with our Symphony Orchestra during the rehearsals in 1988.