LA MONNAIE / DE MUNT

Call it magnetism, call it hypnotic powers, but when Audrey Bonnet enters a space, something happens. That goes for both the empty opera stage in Romeo Castellucci’s production of Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, and the small rehearsal studio where we meet the French actress to discuss her internationally lauded 'tour the force'. Have a look for yourself.

It takes the power of a heroine, the sensitivity of a virgin and the perseverance of a martyr: the title role in Giovanna d’Arco demands for a soprano out of the ordinary. Enter Salome Jicia! In between two rehearsals, we talked to our lead singer about Verdi, his music and the challenges of singing Giovanna.

Shaping Silence. Get the bigger picture of the creative process behind a brand-new opera, as we follow the artistic team of Le Silence des ombres during their rehearsals.

Part 3: We leave our Workshops and move to the KVS. In the last stretch of the production process, composer Benjamin Attahir dots the i's and crosses the t's during the stage-orchestra rehearsals, while sopranos Julia Szproch and Raquel Camarinha tell us how they experienced the last few weeks.

Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) marks the return of Romeo Castellucci to La Monnaie. A year after his radical new reading of Die Zauberflöte, the Italian director cum metteur en scène cum lighting and costume designer is turning his attention to Arthur Honegger’s extraordinary ‘oratorio dramatique’. This urgent piece of musical modernism tells the life story of France’s national heroine in eleven scenes, but then in reverse: from her death sentence to her youthful calling. We follow the approach of Honegger and his librettist Paul Claudel, and in our turn present this production in eleven retrogressive steps .

Part 2 of our video series on the rehearsals of Le Silence des ombres, starring composer Benjamin Attahir himself and with a cameo for an uncommon musical instrument.

Thomas Jolly takes us backstage during the rehearsals for La Monnaie’s brand new opera Macbeth Underworld. France’s latest Shakespeare-sensation talked to us at length about his latest project, the collaboration with Pascal Dusapin and the atmosphere at our opera house.

If you ask Pascal Dusapin, he has “seen everything on film relating to Macbeth.” So it is hardly surprising that the history of cinema greatly inspired the French composer’s new world creation Macbeth Underworld. From Judi Dench, through Orson Welles with a leading role for Roman Polanski.

Shaping Silence. Get the bigger picture of the creative process behind a brand-new opera, as we follow composer Benjamin Attahir,  stage director Olivier Lexa and a cast of young singers during their rehearsals for Le Silence des ombres.

Toward the end of the summer of 1964, John Coltrane left his studio with the draft of a composition that would serve as the foundational text for a whole new genre. Here and there, some schematic indications for the piano or the bass and, in the bottom margin of the score, the following exclamation—All paths lead to God / Prayer entitled—A Love Supreme—hastily scribbled in ballpoint.

To tie in with the world creation of Le Silence des ombres, we asked Benjamin Attahir to provide brief answers to the following questions.

In Bartók / Beethoven / Schönberg, Rosas stages three repertoire pieces in an evening arrangement. The performance is branched throughout the oeuvre of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, propagating roots in the early years but also displaying the various transformations over the years. Dance is an art that is continuously changing but always exists in the now, something made clear by Bartók / Beethoven / Schönberg.

Mystery, suspense and an intangible truth that is beyond words: the work of Belgium’s first and as yet only winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Maurice Maeterlinck never divulges all his secrets. Not even in the Three Little Dramas for Marionnettes (Trois petits drames pour marionettes, 1894), three succinct and unheimlich pieces of theatre poetry revived today in the form of a new La Monnaie opera entitled Le Silence des ombres.