Swiss stage creation

Musical Director Titus Engel
Stage Director and lighting Designer Daniele Finzi Pasca

Einstein-Ensemble

In coproduction with Compagnia Finzi Pasca

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) is a meditation on time, place, spaces and events, human beings and machines. It has no narration, no plot and follows no biographical intention. The audience can take breaks at any chosen moment. The words used and sung are either numbers or syllables, with the occasional “low-sensical” monologue added to the music. “It’s all about time or rather its opposite: trance, a dissolution of time,” says Daniele Finzi Pasca on the piece. He and his company will dive into a world where time is deconstructed into moments, where images and reflections invert into each other; where the players juggle their way towards the final frontier of the meaning of life, or life’s absence of meaning. Titus Engel, Swiss contemporary music specialist, is the pilot of this musical UFO with the ad hoc Einstein-Ensemble as his crew, comprised of students of the Geneva University of Music.

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Musical Director Antonino Fogliani
Stage Director Phelim McDermott

Ochestre de la Suisse Romande
Grand Théâtre Opera Chorus

Giuseppe Verdi’s dedication of his musical talent and fame to the cause of Italian unity had made him world famous. In 1869, the viceroy of – nominally Ottoman – Egypt made a point of building a grand opera house in Cairo and commissioned Verdi for a new work with an Egyptian theme for its opening. And so Aida came to be, an opera that takes place in a very recognizable but completely unhistoric Ancient Egypt. Aida, an Ethiopian prisoner of war, is lady-in-waiting to the Egyptian princess Amneris and in love with the conqueror of Ethiopia, general Radames, who is Amneris’ love interest. Radames, obviously, only has eyes for Aida, who is torn between her love for her country and her passionate desire for the Egyptian hero. British director Phelim McDermott designs a production with immediate visual references to images of military and civil funerals in the war zones of today and that does not seek to hide the true, lethal and disastrous nature of war. This is an Aida for Geneva, birthplace of the international conventions on humanitarian law, where the final sacrifice of Aida and Radames resolves itself in a cry of hope for peace.

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