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ORPHEE ET EURIDICE at La Monnaie



ORPHEE ET EURIDICE –  OPERA by Christoph Willibald Gluck / Hector Berlioz

Orpheus & Eurydice at La Monnaie From 17th June

 

HERVE NIQUET & ROMEO CASTELLUCCI

 

NEW PRODUCTION – PREMIERE ON 17 JUNE 2014, AT 20:00

BRUXELLES/BELGIUM: The masterpiece of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), Orphée et Eurydice, appeared as a work specifically tailored to the world of the Italian director Romeo Castellucci – beautiful, mystical, radical, sometimes cruel, and constantly questioning our human condition. His staging of Parsifal in 2011 confronted us with his very personal universe, which mixed excitement of the senses, confusion, aesthetic pleasure, poetry and bewilderment.

Peter de Caluwe’s new proposal for the Italian director, gradually morphed into an overwhelming project dominated by the figure of Eurydice, a Eurydice trapped in a world of limbo, neither living nor altogether dead, and nevertheless still accessible.

Castellucci wanted to question the reality of this strange state of consciousness by working with a young women suffering from locked-in syndrome; she hears, sees and communicates through her eyes as her body is totally paralyzed – a body that can no longer express itself but never ceases to question. It is neither about voyeurism, or even “staging” in the traditional sense, but it is a work as close to a person as can be, which invites us to rethink life itself

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. After numerous interviews with the young woman, her family, her doctors and the ethics committee of the hospital where she resides, Els will incarnate Eurydice. She will be both spectator and actress in that hospital room where we be following Orpheus.

La Monnaie, Brussels Operahouse. (2013) Foto: Henning Høholt

Gluck’s music creating a powerful and invisible link between her and us, just as Orpheus’s song did between him and her. This is an existential experience, which questions the very human condition that she herself, her family and her doctors live daily. It is an overwhelming experience, which gives full meaning to Orpheus’s journey
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The project will take on the form of a diptych. In Brussels shall be presented the French version of Orphée et Eurydice as revised by Hector Berlioz in 1859, and in Vienna the Italian version, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), for the opening of the Wiener Festival.

Hérvé Niquet, arkivfoto by Henning Høholt (Perigord 2012)

At La Monnaie, the French conductor Hervé Niquet, (photo), whose work we enjoyed in the concert versions of Theodora and Les fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour with his musical ensemble, will make his debuts at the head of the La Monnaie Symphonic Orchestra and Choir.

The two French soranos Stéphanie d’Oustrac and Sabine Devieilhe will incarnate the title roles.

Stéphanie d’Oustrac, who performed in February 2013 the role of the aristocratic Hermiane in Benoît Mernier’s La Dispute, will be Orphée. The young Sabine Devieilhe, named ‘Lyrical Artistic Revelation’ at the Victoires de la Musique in 2013, makes her debut at La Monnaie in the title role of Eurydice.

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