The almost a century old Greek National Opera has moved. He left the 700-seat Italian theater that housed him in the city center for a new hall built at the water's edge.
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Renzo Piano, the famous Italian architect whose agency is located in Paris, has designed a cultural park of 21 hectares, which face the Opera and the National Library around an agora. A major architectural gesture for the Greek capital. The building, topped with a huge roof covered with solar panels, offers a breathtaking view of the city.
Funded by the Stavros Niarchos foundation, the place immediately became a place for strolling for the Athenians and an attraction for tourists. We stroll along the canal, we admire the musical water jets every hour, we rest in this park with Mediterranean essences and of course, we listen to opera.
This new season started with Alban Berg's Wozzeck in a stripping staging by Olivier Py. The Opera thus alternates between covers and new productions, with currently showing The bat by Johan Strauss II, which the director Alexandros Efklidis has adapted to the prism of the country's history, namely the eve of the putsch colonels. A program assumed by the director Giorgos Koumendakis who does not hesitate to order politically or socially disturbing works.
Seen from the sky, the new opera house in the Cultural Center of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation rp
The new hall has 1,400 seats, of which only a very small number with reduced visibility. The armchairs are very comfortable and the seats on the side balconies are turned towards the stage and no longer perpendicular to it, as in the Italian theater which forced spectators to twist their necks. Its acoustics have been the subject of very detailed studies in order to make it "as fine as possible" according to the will of Renzo Piano, himself a great music lover.
A 1,400-seat hall Michel DENANCEMichel Denancé
Upcoming shows: La Papesse Jeanne , a world creation whose score was commissioned from the Greek composer Yiorgos Vassilandonakis, to be succeeded in May by Werther by Jules Massenet, produced by the Paris Opera in a staging by Benoît Jacquot with singer Anita Rachvelishvili in the role of Charlotte.
Then, the Athens Opera will take up its summer quarters in the Odeon of Herod Atticus, the famous amphitheater located under the Acropolis where Maria Callas once sang. There will be given in front of 20,000 spectators on June 4, 6, 9 and 11 a new version of Rigoletto , then from July 29 to 31 the version created in 2012 of Puccini's Tosca … So many more reasons to go and taste the pleasures of Athens !
We offer a video tour of this new building with Giorgos Koumendakis 'Typewriter tune for marimba' in the background and the opening of 'The Bat' played by the orchestra of the National Opera of Greece.