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National Opera of Greece: from Don Giovanni to Madame Butterfly, international directors in the spotlight

2022-09-30T10:25:10.887Z


Krzysztof Warlikowski, John Fulljames, Stephen Langridge, Laurent Pelly, David McVicar or Olivier Py sign the major productions of the season.


In the past, if you traveled to attend an opera performance, it was for a singer or a singer you didn't want to miss any performance.

More rarely for a conductor, unless it was Karajan or Carlos Kleiber.

More and more, the argument for being attracted (or not!) to an operatic production is the name of the director.

Some see it as an anomaly;

we have always tended to consider this tendency to theatricalize opera as progress, in other words to make it what it should never have ceased to be: a total art.

And since we like to compare the interpretations of tenors, sopranos or maestros, why wouldn't it be stimulating to do the same with the proposals of the directors, who allow us to discover new facets of works that we thought we knew by heart?

Thus opera can remain a living art, both timeless and in tune with our times.

Singular and complementary figures

It is in this spirit that the 2022-2023 season of the National Opera of Greece calls on figures that are both singular and complementary to the performing arts.

Some need a key that gives them access to the work, an angle of attack allowing them to include libretto and music in a poetic universe that sheds light on its dramatic springs.

This is the case of Krzysztof Warlikowski, whose

Tales of Hoffmann

, by Offenbach, a co-production with the Brussels Mint, takes place in the world of cinema.

In this opera where the poet Hoffmann confuses fiction and reality by projecting his ideals onto a fantasized female figure, we will evolve from Judy Garland from

A Star Is Born

to a disillusioned porn actress, passing through Greta Garbo and the interchangeable identities of heroines by David Lynch.

Read also

Salzburg Festival: stops on mirages for

Don Giovanni

If Warlikowski works by associations of ideas, John Fulljames plays on transposition in space: for his

Don Giovanni

, a co-production of the National Opera of Greece with the Gothenburg Opera (Sweden) and the Royal Danish Opera , created online on GNO TV, because of the Covid in 2020, three floors of a large luxury hotel.

Upstairs, a corridor leading to the rooms and the lifts, on the ground floor, the reception and the bar, downstairs, the basement where the cold room for the kitchens is located.

The elevator makes it possible to pass from one play area to another, in this impersonal place which favors interrupted encounters and confrontation between social backgrounds, two engines of Mozart's masterpiece.

Here again, the female figures at the center of the character's imagination become interchangeable, losing their individual outlines to become mere projections of Don Juan's mind, confronted with the absurdity of life.

Weaving links between eras

Transposition in time for

Falstaff

, the testamentary stroke of genius of the old Verdi, eager to bow out of a comedy, he who had built his career on his genius for tragedy.

Bittersweet comedy that the British Stephen Langridge, current director of the Glyndebourne Festival, chose to set in England in the 1930s, that of the ephemeral King Edward VIII, Prince of Wales by whom the scandal happened, like that of Shakespeare's play

Henry IV,

where the comic character of Sir John Falstaff appears.

Read also

At the Festival d'Aix 2021, a

Falstaff

on a set

Weaving links between eras is one of the constants of the opera genre, whose strongest plots have this ability to create bridges between a remote time that may seem foreign or disembodied to us and more recent times, which awaken echoes while maintaining a historical distance to avoid the risk of the current becoming obsolete.

Without forgetting the pure imagination summoned by Laurent Pelly for

Le Voyage dans la lune

,

by Offenbach, a co-production with the Opéra-Comique de Paris, of which the Parisian public was deprived due to the pandemic.

A unique style

The question of a director's style arises in different terms when it comes to David McVicar, whose production of

Medea,

by Cherubini, a co-production of the Greek National Opera with the Metropolitan Opera of New York, l Opera du Canada and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, will have opened the Met in New York in September 2022 before Athens, or Olivier Py, who will invest the majestic place of the Roman theater of Herodes Atticus with

Madame Butterfly

in June 2023.

Read also

In Orange, a

transformed

Madame Butterfly

The Briton is a chameleon, capable of putting on modern shows as well as period reconstructions, according to what the subject dictates, always with a keen sense of aesthetics.

The Frenchman, who is staging Puccini's drama for the first time, on the contrary has a trademark that makes him immediately recognizable, through the work on the space carried out in osmosis with the decorator Pierre-André Weitz, whose scenography mobile marries the time of the music.

“Don Giovanni” from October 21 to 29.

“The Tales of Hoffmann”, from December 18 to January 8.

“Falstaff” from January 26 to February 10.

Diptych "Bluebeard's Castle"-"Gianni Schicchi" from March 9 to 24.

“Werther” from March 23 to April 4.

“Médée” from April 25 to May 14.

"Journey to the Moon" on July 12 and 13.

“Madame Butterfly” from June 1 to 10.

“Nabucco” from July 26 to 30.

Source: lefigaro

All life articles on 2022-09-30

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