Promo code - Grand Théâtre de Genève

The first power game of the season is the most political of all Verdi's operas and furthers our exploration of French Grand Opera with the master of the genre, Marc Minkovski. In 1867, at the height of his career, Giuseppe Verdi reluctantly accepted a commission from the Paris Opera, based on Schiller's play Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien, which depicts the Spain of Philip II, a land of honour and hubris, dominated by the Inquisition. With Don Carlos, Verdi exposes the backstage of power and denounces religious fanaticism, but also makes the contradictions and actions of the characters more human. Lydia Steier, who directed Les Indes galantes in 2019, returns with a fresco on absolutism and the culture of secrecy in a dystopian society. 

Since it was first published in 1516, there have been countless adaptations of this 16thcentury best-seller: Orlando furioso by the Tuscan Ludovico Ariosto. George Frideric Handel alone composed three operas directly derived from this paradigm of the chivalric epic poem: among them, Ariodante in January 1735, created to please the fashionable London audience of the brand-new opera house at Covent Garden. The young and fascinating mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre will be our desperate Ariodante for one evening, under the direction of one of the greatest masters of the baroque renaissance, William Christie, with his Orchestre des Arts Florissants. Nicolas Briançon stages this Ariodante with simplicity and sobriety to highlight all its inner violence, passion and compassion.

After Einstein on the Beach at the GTG in 2019, the Compagnia Daniele Finzi Pasca, notably known for creating the impressive 2019 Fête des Vignerons, takes on the opera-tango of María de Buenos Aires, a surreal South American story set to music by Astor Piazzolla with a libretto by Horacio Ferrer. On a set designed by Uruguayan Hugo Gargiulo, the Compagnia Finzi Pasca moves into an incessantly active Buenos Aires jostling with acrobats, dancers, tightrope walkers and storytellers who already wowed us with their new interpretation of Einstein on the Beach. All the solo roles are performed by women: the soprano Raquel Camarinha, with her piercing and moving vocal purity, takes the lead role, and at her side tango singer Inés Cuello, star of the tango scene in Argentina. The HEM Orchestra – with a few additions such as the bandoneonist Marcelo Nisinman – conducted by Facundo Agudin, will perform the mystical milonga of María.

Viennese actor and Tarantino star Christoph Waltz made his operatic directorial debut in 2013 with this production of Der Rosenkavalier, where we meet the aristocratic Marshallin; her very young lover, Count Octavian Rofrano; her boorish cousin, Baron Ochs; and Ochs's future fiancée, Sophie von Faninal, a rich bourgeois girl. The piece is a “comedy in music", but it also deals with infidelity, ageing, sexual and venal predation and altruism in love. Often staged in an overdecorated rococo boudoir, Christoph Waltz filters the psychological precision of The Knight with the Rose through his refined and very detailed reading, putting his finger on the very serious contemporary resonance of the comic devices of yesteryear: Baron Ochs caught in flagrante at an inn on the outskirts of Vienna in 1750 points to a certain scandal in a New York Sofitel in 2011 and to a cascade of hashtags challenging patriarchal power trips.  

 February 2019. A tanker carrying acid used in the processing of minerals by industry collides with a bus on a road in Katanga, between Lubumbashi and Kolwezi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The result: more than 20 dead and many injured. Choosing an event involving a Swiss multinational in the DRC, Switzerland's best-known stage director, Milo Rau, delivers his second opera project, a choral and elegiac work on the fate of this village, of these fates ripped apart and, beyond that, a reflection on the forces of good and evil and the interests of both sides. A dance of death, set in motion by a libretto written by the Congolese writer, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, in collaboration with Milo Rau and the Catalan composer Hèctor Parra, who composes the score of this new opera with its chillingly laconic title: Justice. 

The Grand Théâtre de Genève's cruise in the waters of opera-ballet with Leonardo García Alarcón at the helm goes full steam ahead with this new production captained by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui with crew of dancers. Idomeneo, written at the age of 25 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is an opera built around a terrible storm at sea, the result of the struggle between Neptune, who favours the King of Crete Idomeneo on his return from the Trojan War, and Fate, who opposes him. Fate or karma, one of whose symbols in East Asia is the thread. Japanese visual artist Chiharu Shiota designs the set with her trademark: red threads that form a continuously moving palace, a raging ocean, a garden or a sea monster as the gods clash with human destinies. 

The only opera by the French musical genius Olivier Messiaen, premiered in Paris in 1983, describes the life of a great seeker of God and a poor little humble medieval monk: Saint Francis of Assisi. Messiaen, a committed Roman Catholic, put all his skills as a composer into it. His synaesthetic conception of motif, modal and tonal creation, the rhythmic complexity he gleaned from his passionate love of birdsong and the grandeur of his Late French Romantic dramatic gesture, all find their place in this work where musicians, choristers and soloists are not counted by the dozen but by the hundreds. The staging and visual creation of this piece will be directed by Adel Abdessemed, a world-renowned visual artist born in 1971 in Constantine, Algeria. Echoing Francis' praise to the Creator, Adel Abdessemed sees only the thousand colours of Creation as an antidote to the barbarism of our time. 

To close our Tudor trilogy, we find Elizabeth I, at the twilight of her life, facing a plot headed by her favourite, the Earl of Essex Robert Devereux. Here, against a background of tensions between Catholics and Protestants, the royal favourite returns unauthorised by the Queen from his post in Catholic Ireland and ends up losing his head at the Tower of London. Donizetti gives an in-depth psychological account, absent from Maria Stuarda, of the innermost desires for love of this solitary woman, a monarch at the end of her life and reign.  
Continuing their exploration into the fictitious character of the so-called Virgin Queen, Mariame Clément and set designer Julia Hansen investigate the entrails of power and the ambiguity between state and private reasons.

Une trilogie c’est l’occasion de raconter une histoire en plusieurs épisodes. Ici, c’est en plus l’occasion de trouver des points communs entre les personnages et de pouvoir les connaître de près, de grandir et de vieillir avec eux, en tout cas pour ceux qui ne se font pas décapiter en cours de route. Agençant dès le début Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda et Roberto Devereux comme un tout, Mariame Clément et Julia Hansen se sont appliquées à faire des liens ainsi que des variations, mais surtout à créer des sas entre ces pièces. Maintenant qu’on pourra parcourir ce décor de fantômes à souhait d’un temps à l’autre, est-ce que les miroirs s’inverseront ? En tout cas, pouvoir expérimenter ces trois opéras, comme un Ring de Wagner, l’un à la suite de l’autre pendant une semaine, est une occasion très rare. Pour les solistes, ce sera certainement un labyrinthe de virtuosité, de mémoire et d’endurance. Un événement lyrique à ne pas manquer donc : evviva Donizetti et longue vie au belcanto !

Une trilogie c’est l’occasion de raconter une histoire en plusieurs épisodes. Ici, c’est en plus l’occasion de trouver des points communs entre les personnages et de pouvoir les connaître de près, de grandir et de vieillir avec eux, en tout cas pour ceux qui ne se font pas décapiter en cours de route. Agençant dès le début Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda et Roberto Devereux comme un tout, Mariame Clément et Julia Hansen se sont appliquées à faire des liens ainsi que des variations, mais surtout à créer des sas entre ces pièces. Maintenant qu’on pourra parcourir ce décor de fantômes à souhait d’un temps à l’autre, est-ce que les miroirs s’inverseront ? En tout cas, pouvoir expérimenter ces trois opéras, comme un Ring de Wagner, l’un à la suite de l’autre pendant une semaine, est une occasion très rare. Pour les solistes, ce sera certainement un labyrinthe de virtuosité, de mémoire et d’endurance. Un événement lyrique à ne pas manquer donc : evviva Donizetti et longue vie au belcanto !