Promo code - Grand Théâtre de Genève

After his long journey back from Troy, Ulysses finally returns to Ithaca, where a trio of malevolent suitors are pestering his faithful wife, Penelope. The man of many devices faces his ultimate challenge: to make constancy and virtue triumph over treachery and deceit. Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, the least known of Claudio Monteverdi's three surviving operas, is the most tender and moving part of the triptych. Founded in 2008, FC Bergman quickly made a name for itself with its anarchistic, slightly chaotic, but highly evocative and poetic theatrical language. The subject of Ulysses, repeatedly shipwrecked on his way home, seems to be just the thing for this quirky Belgian drama collective, which brings together, according to one critic, "the mystical naturalism of Romeo Castellucci, the melancholic absurdism of Christoph Marthaler, and the dancing dynamics of Pina Bausch."  Fabio Biondi returns to Geneva, with his ensemble Europa Galante, to direct a passionately baroque interpretation of Ulisse.

This new opera, based on the film of the same name by Swiss director Xavier Koller, tells the story of a Kurdish family that abandons kind and country to try to get into paradise, i.e., Switzerland. Like a mirage, this paradise fades away with each step forward and ends up disappearing completely in a snowstorm. More than 30 years ago, a family’s future was sealed by the mountains. Today, people meet their destiny at sea. But for those of us who do not have to make this kind of journey, the story is little more than a parable. Who better to stage this new opera than Hungarian film and theatre director Kornél Mundruczó, already seen in Geneva with The Makropoulos Case (2020) and Sleepless (2022)? The music of this journey into despair, the first of our productions to be cancelled by the 2020 COVID lockdown, is the work of German composer Christian Jost, whose distinctive orchestral writing has the epic proportions of film music and is full of powerful rhythms and great emotions.

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of his second opera: "Even if Katerina Lvovna is a murderer, she is not a scumbag. Her conscience torments her. (...) I can empathise with her...". In addition to murder, the opera features (audibly!) brutal sex, sadistic harassment and sexual assault. Buoyed by the steamy love affair between Katerina and Sergey, the opera also includes fragments of operetta, music hall, cabaret and jazz with the orchestra leading the party - one senses Shostakovich's vast experience as a silent film accompanist. Calixto Bieito, for one, is in a film noir mood, setting the opera in a rotten industrial labyrinth, where one can only work in hazmat suits, and which recalls the polluted and dilapidated metropolises of Russia and China... or Detroit. According to Bieito: "It's not Romeo and Juliet, it's the apocalyptic thriller of love in a post-capitalist system." The Argentine Alejo Pérez conducts the OSR and we introduce the dazzling Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė in the title role.

Giuseppe Verdi’s early work Nabucco has often been interpreted as an epic call (“Va pensiero”) to the national liberation struggle that would eventually lead to Italian unity. However, the opera emphasises, perhaps unwittingly, a particularity of rabbinic thought, the idea of the "withdrawal" of the divine as a presence of absence. Brazilian director, filmmaker and author Christiane Jatahy, who was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2022, will organise the Jewish people’s resistance in Babylon by speaking, as she is wont to do in her readings of the classics, the words of those who are still resisting today at the four corners of the world, from the Middle East to the Amazon. Maestro Antonino Fogliani will lead the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, through the piece’s differences and concordances, along with a cast of extraordinary bel canto singers, including Riccardo Zanellato, Nicola Alaimo and Saioa Hernandez.