Want to watch an opera from your living room? Now you can, thanks to VRT MAX! La Monnaie and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen are each offering three operas to watch for free for six months, with classics by Mozart and Verdi, and Kris Defoort’s The Time of Our Singing.
This offer is not only for seasoned opera lovers, but for anyone who wants to discover this art form in an accessible way. Each recording is preceded by an introduction to help viewers familiarise with the music and the context of the production. Tineke Van Ingelgem, Thomas Blondelle and Kris Defoort, who all collaborated on these productions, discuss the works, the stagings, costumes, props, and much more.
Christina Scheppelmann, La Monnaie’s new General and artistic director, is delighted with this innovative collaboration: ‘One of my main goals is to make the opera accessible to as many people as possible. Thanks to VRT MAX, we are offering hundreds of thousands of people easy and free digital access to three prestigious productions. We hope this will encourage them to discover an art form like few others, and, who knows, to come back for more...’
Chantal Pattyn, director of the classical music radio station KLARA, is also delighted: ‘Opera is an art form that continues to impact people in a very direct way and that also attracts many young people! Tickets for the opera productions of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and La Monnaie usually sell out very quickly, and the most popular operas are even sold out in a matter of hours. That's why I'm very happy to be able to offer some wonderful productions on VRT MAX, accompanied by commentary from our experts. A big thank you to both institutions for making this possible!’
Discover the full offer on VRT MAX:
Get out the napkins because La Monnaie is participating in The Biggest Spaghetti Fest in the World! On Saturday, November 22, we are offering 100 vegetarian meals, accompanied by a guided tour of our Workshops, in support of non-profit organisation Groot Eiland.
As part of the worldwide Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the façade of La Monnaie was lit up in pink on Sunday, 19 October. Through this symbolic gesture, our house aims to highlight what is still insufficiently known about the disease.
During a literary encounter with J. M. Coetzee on the stage of La Monnaie, Christina Scheppelmann announced that the 2003 Nobel Prize winner in Literature is writing a libretto for a new La Monnaie opera, to be premiered in the 2027–2028 season: Elizabeth Costello in limbo.
