Press Kit Season 2018 –19 · 2018-03-17 · Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 3 Editorial In over...

Press Kit

Season 2018 –19

opera dance concert

The Opéra national de LyonWith its history covering over three centuries, in 1996 the Opéra de Lyon was the first French house to become an “Opéra National”. For this institution, such a label is a sign of recognition: for its innovative and dynamic artistic policy; for its national and international outreach thanks to the artistic quality of its productions, its audio-visual approach and its tours; and for the complete creative pole that it represents – with its Orchestra, Choruses, Ballet, Children’s Choir, Studio, and set and costume workshops.The “Opéra National” convention clinches the agreement and the involvement of public authorities: the State, with the Ministry of Culture, the City of Lyon, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region and the Metropolis of Lyon. It confirms the main lines that, in 1996, presided over the drafting of the first text. Today, it also salutes the Opéra National de Lyon as a “citizen’s Opera House”, attached to promoting and developing a policy of openness to all audiences, with accessibility and sustainable development. Its identity is fashioned on a daily basis by all the teams of the Opéra National de Lyon, one of the most dynamic and inventive houses in France or Europe.

The prefect of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region

The Mayor of Lyon

The President of the Lyon Metropolis

The President of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Regional Council

Executive Board of the Opéra de LyonComposition on January 1st, 2018

PresidentRémy Weber

Full Members

State RepresentativeStéphane Bouillon

Representative of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes RegionFlorence Verney-Carron

Representative of the Lyon MetropolisMyriam Picot

Representative of the City of LyonLoïc GraberRichard Brumm

Qualified MembersPaul-Henry WatineJacques GéraultJean-François CarencoRaymond Soubie

The Opéra National de Lyon is approved by the Ministry of Culture, the City of Lyon, Auvergne Rhône-Alpes council and Lyon Metropole.

In 2017, the Opéra National de Lyon won recognition for its "constant artistic excellence, its policy of openness and accessibility, as well as its originality, all of which make it one of Europe’s most inventive and freshest opera companies”, by the prestigious German opera monthly “Opernwelt”, and a jury of 50 international critics:

“Opernhaus des Jahres”(Opera house of the year)

While also winning the 2017 “Best Opera Company” of the year prize, an International Opera Award, attributed by the English-speaking press and the London magazine “Opera”:

“Best Opera Company”

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 3 Editorial

In over four centuries of existence, musical theatre has witnessed the creation of tens of thousands of operas. But, today, just a few dozen titles at most are part of the general repertories of the world’s opera houses. We often find the same ones – from The Magic Flute to the Barber, from Carmen to La Bohème, from Traviata to Tosca. These are of course masterpieces that we love to see again, because we like above all what we know and recognise. And yet, with the opera, as in so many other fields, the world is full of so much beauty which is there to be discovered. This is why, in 2018-2019, the Opéra de Lyon is offering an exploration of less well-known pathways, with works that are not all total rarities, but which are genuine, beautiful discoveries, most of which have never been staged in Lyon.In twenty years, the Opéra de Lyon has put on several visions of the Faust myth: Berlioz, Gounod, Busoni, and Dusapin. Boito’s Mefistofele, which will be a first for us, focuses on the figure of Mephistopheles, “the spirit who always gainsays”. Some more firsts for Lyon: Handel’s Rodelinda, with one of his best librettos, inspired by Corneille; From the House of the Dead, Janáček’s last opera, which is disturbingly emotional, and based on Dostoyevsky; the French premiere of a new opera by the composer George Benjamin, whom I see as a refined miniaturist: Lessons in Love and Violence, which premieres at Covent Garden in London in 2018. And Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress that has never been performed in France, which has an extraordinary score, in which can be heard both echoes from both traditional Russian music and from the composer’s last symphonies. The life and destiny of Kudma, the Enchantress, will be, along with Penelope – in Il ritorno d’Ulisse by Monteverdi – and Dido – in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas –at the centre of our annual festival: as a trilogy of destinies.There are some other rarities: Boris Blacher’s Romeo and Juliet, a dramatic concentration, very close to Shakespeare’s play, Isabelle Aboulker’s Les Enfants du Levant a poignant opera aimed at a young public, and Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue: another minor masterpiece which is inexplicably rarely staged.

Project leadersIn 2018-2019, we will for the first time be welcoming to the Opéra de Lyon four or our era’s major stage directors: Claus Guth for Rodelinda, Krzysztof Warlikowski for From the House of the Dead, Katie Mitchell for Lessons in Love and Violence. And we will be revealing the artist Andriy Zholdak with The Enchantress: this will be the first production in France by this exceptional, volcanic, poetic creator. We will also be discovering the impressive Il ritorno d’Ulisse by the Handspring Puppet Company, a show mingling masks, puppets and people.But we are also remaining loyal to our artistic partners: with Alex Ollé/La Fura dels Baus for Mefistofele; Grégoire Pont who will complete with L’Heure espagnole his Ravel diptych, begun in 2016; David Marton who is staging Dido and Aeneas/Remember me: Purcell’s work and its echoes with our current dreams and anxieties, with the complicity of the jazz composer and guitarist Kalle Kalima; Laurent Pelly for Barbe-Bleue, a fresh step in his richly extraordinary journey through the work of Offenbach.

Holding the baton, there will once more be Daniele Rustioni with his familiar pieces – Mefistofele and Nabucco – but, after the War Requiem, he is widening his repertory even more with The Enchantress.Stefano Montanari will be pursuing his exploration of the baroque repertory with Rodelinda. We shall be seeing again Alejo Perez (From the House of the Dead), Pierre Bleuse (Dido and Aeneas), Jonathan Stockhammer (L’Heure espagnole) and Emmanuel Calef (Romeo and Juliet). And we shall be welcoming for the first time Alexandre Bloch (Lessons in Love and Violence) and Philippe Pierlot, with his Ricercar Consort ensemble, for Il ritorno d’Ulisse.

DanceThe Ballet season at the Opéra is offering a panorama bringing together several of the greatest choreographers from the 20th and 21st centuries: Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Jiří Kylián. There will also be Maguy Marin’s Cinderella, a cult piece, and a signature show of the Opera’s Ballet Company; Cinderella yet again, for we never weary of it, because it is still up-to-date, because many spectators – especially the younger ones – have never seen it. But the Ballet is also hosting the creators of the Peeping Tom company, with 31 rue Vandenbranden, which is entering the repertory. We shall also be staging, as a guest show, Rachid Ouramdane’s company, with a world premiere, Franchir la nuit.

ConcertsThe concert season will see Daniele Rustioni, conducting Verdi’s Nabucco, but also mostly Russian symphonies – chiming with The Enchantress– as well as French and Spanish music. It will also include Sandrine Piau and Montanari in a Handel programme. What is more there will be several recitals and, for Christmas, the traditional concert by the Children’s Choir, as well as, on New Year’s Eve, rather unexpected sun waltzes, from Italian and French operas.

In 2017, the Opéra de Lyon won two major European prizes: the Opera Company of the Year at the International Opera Awards, delivered by the English-speaking press, and Opernhaus des Jahres awarded by the German press, under the aegis of the magazine Opernwelt. This is for me and all the teams in the Opera a reward for long-term effort, which has made this house into a theatre of art and excellence, while remaining accessible to the broadest public, in its full diversity. But these prizes also represent a renewed requirement for us, because the level of quality of an opera house must be measured daily, by the excellence of yesterday’s performance.The 2018/2019 season bears witness to such requirements, which are part of the Opéra National de Lyon’s DNA. Daring, slightly offbeat, off the beaten track of the main repertory, it aims at sharpening curiosity, opening the mind, and being an invitation to pleasure, with the risk of straying off limits.

Serge DornyGeneral Director of the Opéra de Lyon

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 Opera4

MefistofeleArrigo Boito

A little-known workBoito’s work has rarely been honoured in France, even at the Opéra de Paris where it premiered in 1912, and in the past few decades has had only three performances in 1989 in its concert version. It is thus all the more passionate that the Opéra de Lyon, which likes to put on productions of little-known works, is taking on a piece that definitely deserves better.

Arrigo Boito: an intellectual flagship at the birth of ItalyArrigo Boito is known for his collaborations with Verdi, for Simon Boccanegra, which he revised in 1881, for Otello (1887) and for Falstaff (1893), a collaboration due to both Boito’s literary qualities, which Verdi knew well, and to his musical excellence. Boito was an intellectual belonging to the most innovative circles of the Italian literary world, to the Scapigliatura movement (which was a kind of Bohemia), a current that aimed at breaking with tradition and romanticism, and whose guiding light was Charles Baudelaire. The Scapigliati (or “dishevelled”) were set on breaking from official culture, a triumphant bourgeoisie and all traditional artistic forms. In 1868, when he wrote Mefistofele, he was just 26 and most of his career still lay in front of him (he died in 1918), he wrote poetry, novels, short stories and plays. For the opera, apart from Mefistofele and Nerone, and his collaboration with Verdi, there should be mentioned La Gioconda de Amilcare Ponchielli (1876).Arrigo Boito was one of the most representative intellectuals of an Italy that thrived during the second half of the 19th century.

Mefistofele, a reference form of Faust As opposed to Gounod’s Faust (1859), still subject to the forms of romantic Grand Opera, and under the influence of Wagnerian theories – it is no doubt for this reason that he wrote his opera’s libretto himself –with Mefistofele Boito provided a highly developed work with in particular a great importance given to the chorus, dramatically perhaps closer to Berlioz than Gounod, despite its four acts with a prologue and epilogue, which failed to convince the audience at La Scala. It was a fiasco, and Boito went back to work on it; before offering a revised version in 1875 which this time was a success. But times had changed, and Wagnerian operas were being accepted better by audiences who had seen Lohengrin in Bologna in 1871. This is how we should gauge this Mefistofele, whose main character is not Faust, but his diabolical double, sung in an impressive bass (Faust is a tenor, and Marguerite a soprano) presenting a totally innovative music whose composer hoped would be a model to be followed.

The Lyon production Entrusted to Alex Ollé and la Fura dels Baus, who gave us Tristan und Isolde in 2011 and The Flying Dutchman in 2014, an imaginary will certainly be exploited in this piece in which Boito attempted to play on the linearity of the tale of Faust Part 1, and the more extended space of Part 2. And it is Daniele Rustioni who will take care of the score, and will doubtlessly bring out its writing which is so special and at the same time sumptuous and luxurious. This is an exceptional opportunity to enter into a work of an immense cultural, intellectual and musical interest.Guy Cherqui

MefistofeleOpera with a prologue, 4 acts and an epilogue, 1867Libretto by the composerIn Italian

Conductor: Daniele RustioniDirector: Alex Ollé / La Fura dels BausSets: Alfons FloresCostumes: Lluc CastellsLighting: Urs Schönebaum

Mefistofele: John Relyea Faust: Paul Groves Margherita / Elena: Evgenia Muraveva Marta / Pantalis: Agata Schmidt

Orchestra, Chorus and Children’s Choir of the Opéra de Lyon

New productionAs a coproduction with the Oper Stuttgart and the Teatro of the Opera di Roma

October 2018Thursday 11th 8 pmSaturday 13th 8 pmMonday 15th 8 pmWednesday 17th 8 pmFriday 19th 8 pmSunday 21st 4 pmTuesday 23rd 8 pm


Concert opera

NabuccoOpera in four parts, 1836 Libretto by Temistocle SoleraIn Italian

Conductor: Daniele Rustioni

Nabucco, King of Babylon: Leo Nucci Abigaille, slave, supposedly his elder daughter: Anna Pirozzi Ismaele, nephew of the King of the Hebrews, in love with Fenena: Antonio Poli Zaccaria, High Priest of Jerusalem: Riccardo Zanellato Fenena, Nabucco’s daughter: Enkelejda Shkosa

Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra de Lyon

As a coproduction with the Théâtre des Champs ElyséesIn partnership with Auditorium de Lyon

At the Auditorium-Orchestrenational de LyonNovember 2018Monday 5th 8 pmWednesday 7th 8 pm

NabuccoGiuseppe Verdi

Nabucco and the myth of the RisorgimentoIn Nabucco, the general public awaits and remembers the famous chorus, Va pensiero, which stands as a second Italian national anthem, in competition with the martial Fratelli d’Italia. There is thus something highly symbolic in the way Nabucco is associated with the Risorgimento, and Italy’s combat for its independence. But in 1842 this claim was still a little fresh, while the legend of Nabucco is closely linked to it and provided Verdi with a symbol for Italian unity (V.E.R.D.I: Vittorio-Emanuele Re D’Italia). Leaving behind the mythological side, Nabucco was Verdi’s first big success at la Scala, with which he had a stormy and contrasted relationship subsequently. Nabucco is above all about the librettist Temistocle Solera, who was so connected to Verdi’s first operas (the collaboration was to end with Attila) and who is perhaps at the origin of the myth of a Verdi bound up with the Risorgimento, as suggested by the historian Pierre Milza.

The emblematic opera of the young VerdiThere can be doubt that Nabucco is the emblematic opera of the young Verdi, with its urgency, its numerous marches, its vigorous choruses, and above all the extreme difficulty of certain roles, including Abigaille, considered to be alongside Odabella (Attila) and Lucrezia (I due Foscari) as one of the most difficult roles in Verdi’s writing, because of its dramatic coloratura soprano voice, requiring striking deep notes, sharp high ones, a cold and striking colour, and a capacity to take on challenging agilities. The other original point was to give a lead role to a baritone: Verdi is undoubtedly the composer who ennobled the baritone

voice, which is less spectacular than a tenor: as well as the vital roles for baritones in his work (Luna, Renato, Jago, Posa, Monforte, Amonasro, Francesco Foscari and so on), he gave baritones the main roles in Simon Boccanegra, Rigoletto, Macbeth, Falstaff and of course Nabucco. It is Verdi that has most highlighted this voice. Finally, a tenor is given a secondary role (Ismaele) as well as a mezzo-soprano, here used contrary to normal practice in a rather lyric role (Fenena). There is thus a great deal of originality in the unusual treatment of voices and the essential role of the chorus.

An exceptional castNabucco stands up perfectly either in its concert or stage version. Here, the concert version will be presented, in Lyon and at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, thus continuing the exploration of the early Verdi after Attila during the previous season. Daniele Rustioni, at the head of teams of the Opéra de Lyon, is currently considered to be, among the younger generation, one of the greatest specialists in this repertory, capable both of giving the required energy but also, which is less frequent, showing up the refinements of a music that is less “rustic” than it first seems. He will conduct a cast of an exceptional quality, dominated by a Nabucco sung by the venerable Leo Nucci, who continues to play this role across the world’s stages, and by the young Anna Pirozzi, a rising star of Italian opera as Abigaille; they will be accompanied by the bass Riccardo Zanellato, a regular of the Lyon stage, as Zaccaria, the young and brilliant tenor Antonio Poli as Ismaele, and Enkelejda Shkosa, as a marvellous Fenena.Guy Cherqui


L’Heure espagnoleMaurice Ravel

First staged on 19th May 1911 at the Opéra-Comique, L’Heure Espagnole is a “musical comedy”, a modernist fantasy with a tinge of vaudeville and the low-life. For his first opera, Maurice Ravel chose a poem by Franc-Nohain, a well-known journalist and writer during the belle époque and who has (almost) been forgotten since, so as to allow himself to make absolutely delightful musical and vocal experiments. Here, it is being staged by the imagistic magician Grégoire Pont, who masterly reinvented L’enfant et les sortilèges, the French composer’s second opera, in November 2016 for the Opéra de Lyon. Thus his Heure Espagnole will be vibrant with new harmonies.

A musical fantasia, an amusing and scandalous farce As the French composer’s first piece for the stage, L’Heure Espagnole is a farce that brings together a woman, her husband, and her three lovers. This leads to inevitable collisions, with situations that are amusing, comic, and virtually scandalous, which thus led to such a long wait between the origins of the project and its production. Subsequently, the opera was called, after its premiere, a piece of “pornographic” vaudeville. It also needs to be said that both Franc-Nohain and Ravel were making fun of their elders, the former producing a light-hearted pastiche of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, and the former parodying opera-bouffe and its grand duos, but without forgetting himself. When the curtain comes up, bells chime at different rhythms, at once showing that the action is taking place at a clock-

maker’s, while the orchestra rumbles and clicks with unusual sounds made by springs, rattles and a whip. Later, the alterations of the singers’ voices, based on the original prosodies, were set to heighten the public’s curiosity and taste for the new.

An atypical director, coming from illustrationThe Opéra de Lyon has decided to entrust the direction of this new production to Grégoire Pont, an illustrator for the young, and well-known for his series Les Excalibrius, whose adventures appear monthly in the magazine Toboggan (Milan Presse) and his production of animations for the classical music magazine Presto!, on the TV channel France 2. The audience in Lyon discovered his world thanks to the latest version of L’enfant et les sortilèges, co-produced with the Auditori of Barcelona. This fantastical, mysterious world around Ravel’s second and final opera, enchanted both the audiences and the critics. By working closely on the score, he is aiming to remain as close as possible to the music and use animated images as a living matter, in perpetual motion, mingling graphic styles, from the simplest to the most luxuriant, with a distinct taste for 1950s cartoons. Accompanied by the British director James Bonas, who is responsible for the spatial staging, Grégoire Pont will thus be able to give free rein to his imagination while his allusions wander alongside the rhythm of the witty espagnolades of one of the most influential French composers of his era.Gallia Valette-Pilenko

L’Heure espagnoleMusical in one act, 1907 Libretto by Franc-NohainIn French

Conductor: Jonathan StockhammerConcept and video: Grégoire PontDirector: James BonasSets and costumes: Thibault VancraenenbroeckLighting: Christophe Chaupin

Singers of the Studio of the Opéra de Lyon

Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon

November 2018Saturday 17th 3 pmSaturday 17th 7.30 pmSunday 18th 4 pmTuesday 20th 7.30 pmWednesday 21st 7.30 pm


RodelindaGeorg Friedrich Handel

A love triangle from beyond the gravePremiered on 13th February 1725 in London, Rodelinda is Handel’s third masterpiece composed in under twenty months for the Royal Academy of Music, just after Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) and Tamerlano. At the height of his creativity, Handel had at his disposal a cast of singers who were as faithful as they were exceptional: the castrato Senesino as the primo uomo and the soprano Cuzzoni as the prima donna, and, as the traitor, the bass-baritone Boschi, whom Handel always cherished by offering him the finest airs of vengeance in his operas. At the time, he also had a vibrant tenor to embody the rival in love, Borosini, thus allowing him to compose one of the finest panoplies of arias in his entire repertoire. To do so, he turned to the person who was to become his favourite librettist, Antonio Salvi, who adapted a tale by Corneille with the complicity of Nicolas Haym, who had already worked on Giulio Cesare. Queen of Lombardy, Rodelinda wants to remain faithful to her husband, Bertarido, whom she believes to be dead, while she is being courted by the usurper to the throne, Grimoaldo. There thus builds up a love triangle from beyond the grave, with love rivalries, the thirst for power, a real/false spectre, and an impossible bereavement, putting to the test conjugal love, which is one of Handel’s themes, and surprisingly little dealt with in operas.

The most modern of Handel’s operasRodelinda was one of the great successes of Handel’s early London period, while being also the first of his operas to be revived in the 20th century, in 1920 in

Göttingen. The success was once more phenomenal: 136 performances were put on throughout Germany, with Rodelinda benefiting from its analogies with Beethoven’s Fidelio. In both works, the heroine finally descends into her husband’s prison to free him, thus producing seminal scenes. But, as well as being one of Handel’s great divas, inflexible and mistress of her destiny, as per the composer’s usual feminism, Rodelinda is also “one of the best librettos that Handel set, with a coherent, closely concentrated action” (Piotr Kaminski, A Thousand and One Operas). It was a challenge, given that he remained obstinately faithful to the model of the Italian 18th-century opera seria, alternating arias da capo and recitatives. In Rodelinda, Handel composed genuine dramatic scenes, both coherent and driven, finely chiselled in terms of their characters, while developing his usual model of bel canto to bring genuine drama to his music, thus opening the path to more modern productions.

Voyeurism according to Claus GuthBrought to attention with his Mozart/ Da Ponte trilogy in Salzburg in 2011, including Le Nozze di Figaro under the baton of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Claus Guth has already staged Handel’s music on several occasions (Radamisto, The Messiah and Jephtha at the beginning of year at the Opéra de Paris). As an enthusiast of dramas of enclosure, he here plunges us into the isolation of a massive white house, the prison of a couple seen through the eyes of a child, tormented by his own voyeurism.Luc Hernandez

Rodelinda Opera in three acts, 1725Libretto by Nicola Francesco HaymIn Italian

Conductor: Stefano MontanariDirector: Claus GuthSets and costumes: Christian SchmidtLighting: Joachim KleinChoreography: Ramses SiglVideo: Andi MüllerDramaturgy: Konrad Kuhn

Rodelinda: Sabina Puértolas Grimoaldo: Krystian Adam Eduige: Sara Mingardo Unulfo: Christopher Ainslie Bertarido: Lawrence Zazzo / Xavio SabatoGaribaldo: Jean-Sébastien Bou


New productionAs a coproduction with the Teatro Real de Madrid, the Liceu Barcelona and the Oper Frankfurt.

December 2018Saturday 15th 7.30 pmMonday 17th 7.30 pmWednesday 19th 7.30 pmFriday 21st 7.30 pmSunday 23rd 4 pmWednesday 26th 7.30 pmFriday 28th 7.30 pm

January 2019Tuesday 1st 4 pm


From the house of the deadLeoš Janáček

Jail BluesAdapted from Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead (1862), Leoš Janáček’s last opera also stands as the highest point in his operatic art. As a Russophile, this Czech patriot personally translated this work by the author of The Idiot and on stage preserved its semi-documentary nature by writing a libretto without any defined hero or dramatic plot to hang onto. The protagonists are prisoners in a Siberian jail, and each act tells, along with daily prison life, the tale attached to one of the prisoners: Skuratov killed a German who was to be betrothed to his lover; Chichkov murdered his wife, who was in love with another man…

Pick up New SticksThis mosaic of testimonies showing up contrasting destinies, in the dimness of prisons, can be associated with the compositional procedures of Janáček, who was used to a free sequencing of harmonies, and who looked in his music for a transposition of an objective sonic truth. The motifs mutate and follow one another permanently, inspired from spoken language, whose forms and structures, inflexions and intonations, the Moravian composer had collected all his life. His plain orchestrations, with their characteristic economy, are here heightened by astounding colours, with associations between players bringing out extremes. In the orchestral pit of the Opéra de Lyon, the Argentinian conductor Alejo Perez will give full life to this atypical teeming. This former assistant of Péter Eötvös, who conducted

the Ensemble Intercontemporain and started out in France in 2005, in Lyon, with Hans Werner Henze’s Pollicino, is a great connoisseur of the 20th-century repertory.

Warlikowski’s challengesThis flagship work from the first half of the 20th century has now been visually marked by the work of Patrice Chéreau. In 2007, at the Wiener Festwochen, under the baton of Pierre Boulez, he provided a production bringing together a pronounced theatrical realism as well as a fantastical use of sets, capable of transcending different concentration camp models - from the Tsarist camps of Dostoyevsky to the Soviet work camps of the 1920s, which were to turn into the gulag. Through the prisoners, it is the prison that takes possession of the work, and acts as a heroine. Krzyzstof Warlikowski’s work is based on the same pillars. Its proximity with theatre is blatant. With him, singers are also actors, with a pressure on their play which is constantly questioned and refined. His work with the soprano Barbara Hannigan on Lulu or La Voix humaine clearly goes much farther than the usual dramatic approaches to operatic productions. Finally, his capacity to bring together on the stage opposing space-times provides his work with a depth that at worst fascinates, and at best creates original semantic openings. How will this director free himself from the universal heritage of Chéreau, whom so many others have followed, to impose his own singularity?

Z mrtvého domuOpera in three acts and two tableaux, 1930Libretto by the composer after The House of the Dead by Fyodor Mikhailovich DostoyevskyIn Czech

Conductor: Alejo PérezDirector: Krzysztof WarlikowskiSets and costumes: Malgorzata SzczęśniakLighting: Felice RossChoreography: Claude BardouilVideo: Denis GuéguinDramaturgy: Christian Longchamp

Alexandre Petrovitch Gorjantchikov: Sir Willard White Aljeja, a young Tartar: Pascal Charbonneau Filka Morozov, prisoner under the name of Luka Kuzmich: Stefan Margita Big prisoner: Nicky Spence Prison Governor: Alexander Vassiliev Elderly prisoner: Graham Clark Skuratov: Ladislav Elgr Tchekunov: Ivan Ludlow Drunk prisoner: Jeffrey Lloyd‑Roberts Prisoner (playing the roles of Don Juan and the Brahmin): Ales Jenis Kedril: John Graham-Hall Sapkin: Dmitry GolovninSiskov: Sergei Leiferkus


New productionAs a coproduction with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie Bruxelles

January 2019Monday 21st 8 pmWednesday 23rd 8 pmFriday 25t h 8 pmSunday 27th 4 pmTuesday 29th 8 pmThursday 31st 8 pm

February 2019Saturday 2nd 8 pm


Romeo and JulietBoris Blacher

Not changing a word of Shakespeare’s text seems to have been Boris Blacher’s guiding light for his Romeo and Juliet, while keeping a few essential scenes centred on the theme of dreaming. The result is a Romeo who is anti-romantic, raving, passionate and radical. He places at its centre the story of Queen Mab which had already so fascinated Berlioz. Queen Mab, Shakespeare tell us, is the “fairies’ midwife”, who brings to life our hidden desires. Boris Blacher’s opera is like a dream of Romeo and Juliet in which he applies to Shakespeare’s material the same principles of shifts, inversions and condensations as described by Freud. I get the impression that Blacher, writing amidst the horror of war, chose to highlight in his opera the play’s impulsive aspect. It is the murderous impulsions of fathers and sons that dominate everything in this drama. But dreams, through their strangeness still remain mysterious. The great quality of this score is to conserve all of the play’s poetry,

fantasy and sense of dreaming without any fascination for violence, which is never displayed, while the music allows us to escape from it.And, amid all of this, there are songs in the purest Berlin cabaret tradition with a honkytonk piano. It is a homage to the insolent avant-garde which the Nazis intended to suppress, in the very midst of a tragedy. How to imagine a more Shakespearean contrast?For our show, with Lisa Navarro, we have imagined a group of young people together in a cellar to perform Romeo and Juliet with the means that come to hand, in rubble and dust. Photos of the Reichstag blackened by bombing and covered with graffiti by Russian soldiers were our starting point. We wanted to recover the ephemeral nature of these gestures, and the naivety of these signs so as to give a certain lightness to this “stage-less” opera, written during bombing.Jean Lacornerie

Romeo und JuliaChamber opera in three parts, composed in 1943Libretto by the composer, after William ShakespeareIn English and German

Conductor: Emmanuel CalefDirector: Jean LacornerieSets: Lisa NavarroCostumes: Robin CheminLighting: David DebrinayChoreography: Raphaël Cottin



Revival of the 2015 production at the Opéra de LyonAs a coproduction with the Théâtre de la Croix-Rousse

February 2019 Friday 8th 8 pmSaturday 9th 7.30 pmSunday 10th 3 pmTuesday 12th 8 pmWednesday 13th 8 pmThursday 14th 8 pmFriday 15th 8 pm


Towards a triptych of destiniesIn a sense, the 2019 Festival is offering a Triptych of Destinies, particularly faithful to the philosophy of the Opéra de Lyon: innovative and unexpected visions, little-known works that are deeply connected, various aspects of human destinies, with different musical conceptions that will offer the public a genuine journey.

Three stories, three views of destinyQuestions might be asked about the idea of destiny in opera: it is clearly conveyed in half the works in the repertory! But the 2019 Festival has identified three works which each deal with the question of destiny in their own way, especially via the great myths that have constituted western culture and the extremely original views of the production. Dido and Æneas and Il ritorno di Ulisse are operas that tell the story of two fraternal heroes, Ulysses and Æneas, whose journeys are destinies in themselves, one towards a longed-for and ever-distant “Ithaca”, the other for an “Italy” as sung by the chorus in Berlioz’s Troyens, seen as targets set about with obstacles. These two destinies-cum-journeys are confronted by Tchaikovsky’s singular Enchantress. In an inn which is a meeting place for overly free spirits, artists or anti-conformist thinkers, Nastassia, an extraordinarily beautiful inn-keeper, seduces Prince Kurlyatev, sent to put her out of business, and

his son Yuriy, who have become rivals. She ends up being poisoned by the prince’s wife, and mother of Yuriy, who sees her as a witch, an obsessive, and an obstacle to a normal, straightforward life. The Ulysses’ destiny was Circe, another enchantress, while for Æneas it was of course Dido, while for the Prince and above all his son Yuriy, whose love was shared, it was Nastassia, who was too beautiful and free-thinking to live. Such crossed threads give to the whole a “deep and saturnine unity”.

Productions as variations The productions in this festival thus offer very different and particularly original views of this question.Tchaikovsky’s Enchantress, conducted by Daniele Rustioni, whose repertory has now been widened to this rarely performed and little-know work, will be directed by the Ukrainian Andriy Zholdak, who rarely stages operas, but to whom we owe a stunning König Kandaules by Zemlinsky at the Opera des Flandres, a pitiless painter of passions and the ravages of desire as instruments of destiny, and one of today’s most original stage directors.For Il ritorno d’Ulisse, the staging on offer is that of the famous Handspring Puppet Company, which established William Kentridge. It has been played round the world since it was premiered in 1998. Just like for its first performance, Philippe Pierlot is staging it, with artists from the Studio of the Opéra de Lyon. Ulysses (who means at the same time “human fragility”, a Monteverdian allegory) sees on his death bed his life pass before him, while his destiny is being dictated by the allegorical figures that introduce the piece. With death as destiny’s end.Death is something Dido confronts after the departure of Æneas, towards his own destiny, in a story lodged in our memories, which the director David Marton (who has already worked on this point with Orpheus and Eurydice) will treat as an archaeologist, by linking Purcell’s work to the plot of the film “Remember me”, thanks to the Finnish composer Kalle Kalima, it becomes a modern story which gradually brings out another one: Dido and Æneas, is like a world that has vanished beneath archaeological layers in a dialogue between memory and now. The whole has been placed under the direction of the young Pierre Bleuse, to whom we owe the excellent Mozart and Salieri at the start of the 2017-2018 season.Guy Cherqui

Festival

Life and Destinies


The EnchantressPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Portrait of an untamed artistAndriy Zholdak is an exceptional director. Originally from Ukraine, he studied in Moscow with Anatoli Vassiliev, a man of the theatre respected in France, and who is an exceptional teacher. Without wishing to reduce him to the status of a successor, it can still be stated that the master taught him his art, which should be a personal approach, both poetic and free, to the texts being staged.

I owe my discovery of him to Gogol’s novel, Taras Bulba, a tale in which can be found the legend of the Cossacks of Ukraine, and whose adaptation dazzled me in Saint Petersburg, while a crowd of astonished critics called it a scandal. Yes, it was a real scandal, but one that opened wide the doors of the theatre to journeys from disturbing visual solutions, with space sliced up in an original way, using materials that, gradually, turned out to be the constants of Zholdak’s world. In particular milk, a nutriment which, in large quantities, stands out on the stage thanks to its whiteness, as well as the mythology of fertility associated with it. Zholdak has a broad vision and aims at excess: it is his rebellious identity which, without either reservation or censorship, affirms itself with an incandescence that cannot be seen anywhere else.

With no precautions, Zholdak throws himself, body and soul, into the idea of providing direct, personal, original illustrations of the relationship of the struggle that has already been set up with the work in hand. He does not offer an

“interpretation” of it, but rather a series of confessions, dreams or visions about what it inspires in him. He invites us to an affirmed “stage universe”, which can sometimes seem almost autonomous. On examining this artist’s career, what emerges, discreetly, is his attraction for mythological female figures; he affirms their constant power of seduction and explores them, while keeping their inexpressible explosive side. They are not iconic women, but volcanic women, the source of nameless conflagrations and extreme passions. He has thus built up a genuine group, going from Medea to Electra, from Phaedra to the Princess Turandot, or from Anna Karénine to Madame Bovary... with him, women stand out as the explosive centre of his world. Zholdak has also put on memorable productions of Shakespeare, in particular Othello. What is more, it remains associated to a unique work of adaptation of classic novels, such as The Idiot, or else modern works that have marked our society, in particular in Russia: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (2003), Erofeyev’s Life with an Idiot (2007) or, more recently, Stanislas Lem’s Solaris (2017). Here, his involvement in the language of the stage, displayed with an unseen intensity disturbs, and shakes us up; he draws the audience to him passionately, if they can only accept to take part in such a radical experience. His latest masterpiece was Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (2016), a meditation on the commotion between love and faith! Georges Banu

TcharodeïkaOpera in four acts, 1887Libretto by Ippolit ShpazhinskyIn Russian

Conductor: Daniele RustioniDirector and lighting: Andriy ZholdakSets: Andriy Zholdak and Daniel ZholdakCostumes: Simon Machabeli

Prince Nikita Kurlyatev, deputy of Nizhniy-Novgorod: Evez AbdullaPrincess Yevpraskiya Romanovna, his wife: Ksenia VyaznikovaPrince Yuryi, their son: Migran AgadzhanyanMamïrov, an old deacon: Piotr MicinskiNenila, his sister, lady in waiting of the princess: Mairam SokolovaIvan Zhuran, valet of the prince: Oleg BudaratskiyNastasya (nicknamed Kuma), inn-keeper: Elena Guseva Lukash, son of the merchant: Christophe Poncet de SolagesPayisy, vagabond in the guise of a monk: Vasily Efimov


New production

March 2019Friday 15th 7.30 pmTuesday 19th 7.30 pmFriday 22nd 7.30 pmSunday 24st 4 pmWednesday 27th 7.30 pmFriday 29th 7.30 pmSunday 31st 4 pm

Festival

Life and Destinies


A Dido & ÆneasHenry Purcell / Kalle Kalima

As an ancient queen, disappointed in love, Dido is the first great operatic heroine. Her destiny inspired Henry Purcell and his librettist Nahum Tate with a sizzling work of concision and intensity. Written for Josias Priest’s girls’ school, in Chelsea, this mini opera premiered in December 1689. The libretto tells the tale of the fateful love affair between Aeneas, expelled from Troy, and the Queen of Carthage. The will of the gods was soon to send away this prince and founder Rome, abandoning Dido to a painful suicide. Remember me, the lament that concludes the piece, is one of the greatest hits in the baroque repertory. The stage director David Marton has chosen to extend the drama with an eponymous piece by Kalle Kalima. The Finnish jazzman thus offers a sonic mirror to the distress of the betrayed Queen.

A political metaphor The legend of Dido appears in Virgil’s Aeneid. This ancient best-seller has generated all the operatic versions of Dido, from Cavalli to Berlioz. The tale told by the Roman writer is extremely political. Aeneas, who lies at the origin of the mythical founders of Rome, is protected by Venus and Jupiter. But he is above all a migrant, driven away from Troy by Greek invaders. Aeneas comes to

Carthage, where Dido reigns. She herself is a Syrian from Tyr who fled the civil war and found refuge in Tunisia, where her cunning allowed her to acquire a huge territory. This passion of Dido for Aeneas can also be read as a metaphor for the confrontation between Antiquity’s two economic capitals. Delenda Carthago: the military and incendiary campaign that destroyed the city in 146 BCE thus underlies Virgil’s poem, written a century after the end of the Punic Wars.

David Marton and Kalle Kalima After having put on Schreker, Gluck, Berlioz and Richard Strauss, the young Hungarian director, nourished by the Berlin stage work of Christoph Marthaler, is coming back to the Opéra de Lyon thanks to this emblematic baroque work. It provides many levels of interpretation, from the classic cultural tradition (Virgil, Rome, London) to the current, vivid geopolitical situation of our Europe. This play of mirrors has inspired the Finnish jazz guitarist, and figure of the Berlin underground scene, Kalle Kalima, with an independent echo, entitled Remember me. His writing, in which can be heard the influences of Leonard Cohen, Sibelius and Marty Robbins, goes back over Purcell’s celebrated ground. Vincent Borel

According to Dido and AeneasOpera with a prologue and three acts, 1689 after the Aeneid in book IV by VirgilLibretto by Nahum TateIn English

Conductor: Pierre BleuseDirector: David MartonDécors: Christian FriedländerCostumes: Tabea BraunLighting: Henning StreckComposition: Kalle Kalima

Dido: Alix Le SauxAeneas: Guillaume AndrieuxBelinda: Claron McFaddenSinger: Erika Stucky


New productionIn partnership with the Ruhrtriennale

March 2019Saturday 16th 8 pmSunday 17th 4 pmWednesday 20th 8 pmThursday 21st 8 pmSaturday 23rd 8 pmTuesday 26th 8 pmSaturday 30th 8 pm

Festival

Life and Destinies


The Return of UlyssesClaudio Monteverdi / Philippe Pierlot William Kentridge / Handspring Puppet Company

Sculptures and designsFounded in Cape Town in 1981, Adrian Kohler’s and Basil Jones’s Handspring Puppet Company has developed a multi-disciplinary theatre with a strong visual dimension. It gained international renown thanks to its collaboration with William Kentridge on several shows (Woyzeck on the Highveld, 1992; Faustus in Africa, 1995; Ubu and the Truth Commission, 1997) in which the graphic work of the artist-director marks the emotional background of the action played out by large puppets made of raw timber. While the success of War Horse (2007) is continuing in New York City and London, the company is today reviving its legendary productions from the 1990s, alongside new productions.

An opera in its native stateAs the only opera staged by the Handspring Puppet Company, Il ritorno d’Ulisse is here presented in a condensed version, freed of its baroque ornamentation (ballet of the Moors, the flying chariot, etc.) and focused on its two protagonists: Ulysses and Penelope. In a wooden amphitheatre reminiscent of the first Renaissance theatres, singers and puppeteers bring to life characters with craggy faces. On the screen behind them other figures arise, which can be animal, vegetable or human, as well as landscapes,

architectures or objects that Kentridge’s fusain highlights or obscures, opens out or transforms, as charcoal presences among which photographs are sometimes brought in. A flying owl accompanies Minerva, temples arise, and trees unfurl their foliage to express the love of these finally reunited spouses.

The memory of UlyssesThese images are also visions of a soul on the verge of passing away. So it is that the prologue of the opera does not play on the allegories of Fortune, Love, Time and Human Fragility, as in the original libretto, but focuses on the doctors around the aged Ulysses’s bed: on the screen, drawings stand out against the background of an echography. At the moment of his death, the king of Ithaca recalls the story of his return, his fight against the suitors, and his reuniting with Penelope. There are thus sometimes two embodiments of Ulysses on stage: one, lying in bed and remembering, while the other is reliving his adventures one last time. Two views cross over one another, just as, on the stage, the Greek myth, the baroque age and the modern era, not so much to express the exploits of an ancient hero, but rather the suffering of people united by love, but whom destiny separated for so long.

ll ritorno d’Ulisse in patria”Dramma in musica“ with a prologue and three acts, 1640Libretto by Giacomo BadoaroIn Italian

Director and video animation: William Kentridge with Luc de WitMusical director and Music arrangements: Philippe PierlotSet design: Adrian Kohler and William KentridgePuppets and costume design: Adrian Kohler from Handspring Puppet CompanyLighting design: Wesley FranceVideo Film Editing : Catherine Meyburgh


Ricercar Consort

The 1998 version of Return of Ulysses was produced by La Monnaie/De Munt (Brussels, Belgium),Handspring Puppet Company (Cape Town, South Africa), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna, Austria),Kunsten FESTIVAL des Arts (Brussels, Belgium) with generous support of the Flemish Government.2016 produced by Quaternaire/Paris and restaged with the support of Asia Culture Center-Asian Arts Theatre (Gwangju, South Korea), the Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival (New York City,U.S.A.) and Musikfestspiele Sanssouci und Nikolaisaal (Potsdam, Germany).

Performed in Lyon in partnership with La Maison de la Danse

At la Maison de la Danse,Lyon 8e

March 2019Friday 29th 8.30 pmSaturday 30th 8.30 pmSunday 31th 5 pm

April 2019Tuesday 2nd 8.30 pmWednedsay 3rd 8.30 pm

Festival

Life and Destinies


Les Enfants du LevantIsabelle Aboulker

Based on a novel by Claude Gritti, Les enfants de l’île du Levant, which was published in 1999, Isabelle Aboulker and Christian Eymery, the associate director of the CREA in Aulnay-sous-bois, have written an opera telling the little-known tale of a penal farming colony made up of minors.In 1850, an act stating that abandoned children, orphans and junior delinquents could be sent to agricultural penal colonies was passed. In 1861, sixty of them – the youngest of whom were not even 6 – left Roquette Prison in Paris to join a farming penal colony in Sainte-Anne on Ile du Levant. On the morning of 18th February, these children set off on foot, walking all the way to Toulon, before being taken on board a ship for the Ile du Levant, where the hell of a penal colony was awaiting them.

Some died there, others managed to escape. This prison was to be closed in 1878 on the orders of the Ministry of the Interior, after the death of the Comte de Pourtalès, its owner.This is the tale that Les enfants du Levant brings back to life, in a score that is both gentle and melancholic, with clear, children’s voices, tinged with the clicking of crickets, and the sound of waves. It is a terrifying testimony to the condition of these children, which ended only in 1934, after a press campaign had unveiled and denounced how such colonies operated, gradually leading to their closure…This work will be embodied by the Children’s Choir of the Opéra de Lyon, a choir and singing school open to children from the age of 7. Gallia Valette-Pilenko

Les Enfants du LevantOpera for children, 2001Libretto by Chrisitian EymeryIn French

Conductor: Karine LocatelliDirector: Pauline LaidetSets: Quentin LugnierCostumes: Aude DesigauxLighting: Benoit Bregeault

Children’s Choir of the Opéra de Lyon


New productionIn partnership with the Théâtre de La Renaissance

At the Théâtre de La Renaissance, OullinsApril 2019Saturday 6th 4 pmSaturday 6th 8 pmSunday 7th 4 pmWednesday 10th 4 pmFriday 12th 8 pmSaturday 13th 4 pmSaturday 13th 8 pm


Lessons in Love and ViolenceGeorges Benjamin

A major composerWith his previous opera, Written on Skin, Georges Benjamin (born in 1960) rose to the summit of modern opera composers. Few creators benefit from such unanimity, both from critics and audiences, not to mention the admiration of his peers. This is to state the importance, six years after the triumph of Written on Skin, already performed over 80 times worldwide, of this new creation put on by the Opéra de Lyon. It also states the importance of his new works. Their contemporaneity gives them a unique strength: closer to us, and often with an unbeatable aesthetic and emotional impact. Georges Benjamin has managed to capture the air of his times, while cunningly keeping his work distant from fashion: thanks to the syncretism of his musical writing, an ear which is so sensitive to marriages of unusual timbres, the clarity of his prosody, his taste for the English language and his theatrical sense, he stands as the heir of the wonderful Benjamin Britten, the composer of Peter Grimes. Like him, Georges Benjamin has a creative power capable of making ancient myths modern.

A highly expected creationFor Lessons in Love and Violence, Georges Benjamin has gone back to his usual partner, the author Martin Crimp, who is English like him, and already scripted his previous operas. After the medieval legends of Written on Skin, this time the duo have taken their inspiration from Elizabethan theatre as well as rapid scene shifts. They have also aimed at

highlighting the complexity of their characters. The plot itself is quite Shakespearian. Trapped between the requirements of love and political duties, a king is led to make a decision… which is fatal. It plunges his country into a civil war, and leads his wife and son to stand up strongly against him. In turn, his son – while trying to re-establish peace –performs a terrifyingly violent act in front of his mother.

Team workIn Lessons in Love and Violence, Georges Benjamin and Martin Crimp will once again work with the stage director Katie Mitchell, a now famous artist for her stage visions which are always astounding, sensual and moving. This amazing trio has been joined by a stunning cast, in particular by Stéphane Degout, who as we know trained at the Atelier Lyrique of the Opéra de Lyon. For his long-expected return to Lyon, this baritone will be accompanied by the famous Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, a modern star of the operatic stage, and the English tenor Peter Hoare. After premiering at the Royal Opera House in London, Lessons in Love and Violence is the fruition of a broad international coproduction. Apart from in Lyon, the opera will be performed at the Dutch National Opera (July 18), the Hamburg Opera (April 19), and, in the coming years, the Chicago Opera, the Liceu of Barcelona and the Teatro Real in Madrid.

Lessons in Love and ViolenceOpera, 2018 Libretto by Martin Crimp In English

Conductor: Alexandre BlochDirector: Katie MitchellSets and costumes: Vicki MortimerLighting: James FarncombeChoregraphy: Joseph Alford

The King: Stéphane Degout Isabelle: Georgia Jarman Gaveston, the foreigner: Gyula Orendt Mortimer: Peter Hoare The boy, the young king: Samuel Boden Witness 2, singer 2, woman 2: Kristina Szabó Witness 3, insane: Andri Björn Róbertsson


Creation, commission and coproduction between the Opéra National de Lyon, the London Royal Opera House, the Amsterdam Nederlandse Opera, the Staatsoper Hamburg, the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Theatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and the Teatro Real of MadridNew production

May 2019Tuesday 14th 8 pmThursday 16th 8 pmSaturday 18th 8 pmMonday 20th 8 pmWednesday 22nd 8 pmFriday 24th 8 pmSunday 26th 4 pm

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 16 Opera

Barbe-BleueJacques Offenbach

Barbe-Bleue, a bloody but also highly amusing bauble, premiered at the Théâtre des Variétés in 1866. This opera bouffe is set in the heritage of La Belle Hélène and La Vie Parisienne. Somewhat stifled between these two monuments to laughter, Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue turns Charles Perrault’s cruel tale into derision. The libretto, by Meilhac and Halévy, lastingly established the collaboration between these cantors of the Second Empire. But there should be no mistake, these three partners, while seemingly mocking high Parisian society, also undertook a subtle killing game.

The Empire of Laughter The terrible story of Barbe-Bleue, in which Charles Perrault recounts the story of King Henry VIII, has inspired several composers and librettists. Just think of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue by Paul Dukas, or Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. But Offenbach’s lightness offers quite another interpretation. Here we have King Bobèche, a spineless monarch, as well as two shepherds in love, the appropriately named Saphir and Fleurette, then a Barbe-Bleue inspired from Falstaff and a leading lady, Boulotte, whose verve sets the plot moving at speed. When it was premiered,

she was played by Hortense Schneider. The “Offenbachian” talent of Laurent Pelly takes on this opera bouffe that mocks the Second Empire. Offenbach, Meilhac and Halévy come over as particularly fine fun-makers. Their Barbe-Bleue, as a gentle parody, is an off-hand blast that comes over as a reflection of the nouveaux riches of the Second Empire. But they paid little attention to Offenbach! Parisian high society adopted the arias of this teeming work that soon overtook Europe and triumphed in New York.

Laurent Pelly, a heightened Offenbach It was with an hilarious Belle Hélène, a discovery at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 2000, that Laurent Pelly became known to the general public. As an enthusiast of comic relief and visual gags, his style is as much derived from the cinema as from cartoons or classic culture. But the director above all started out at the Opéra de Lyon with Orphée aux Enfers (1997). He then directed La Périchole and La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein. The scenographer Chantal Thomas and Laurent Pelly form a striking duo who joyously blow up Rossini or Richard Strauss, Berlioz or Ravel.Vincent Baurel

Barbe-Bleue Opera bouffe in three acts and four tableaux, 1866Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy,In French

Conductor: Michele SpottiDirector and costumes: Laurent PellySets: Chantal ThomasLighting: Joël AdamDramaturgy: Agathe Melinand

Barbe-Bleue: Yann BeuronPrince Saphir: Carl GhazarossianPopolani: Christophe GayOscar: Piotr MicinskiKing Bobeche: Christophe Mortagne


New productionIn partnership with the Royal Opera House Mascat, Oman and the Opéra de Marseille

June 2019Friday 14th 8 pmSunday 16th 4 pmFriday 21st 8 pmSaturday 22nd 8 pmMonday 24th 8 pmTuesday 25th 8 pmSaturday 29th 8 pm

July 2019Monday 1st 8 pm

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 17 Dance

31 Rue VandenbrandenConception, choregraphy and director: Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier / Mezzo-soprano: Eurudike De Beul / Dramaturgy: Hildegard De Vuyst and Nico Leunen / Sound composition: Juan Carlos Tolosa, Glenn Vervliet / Sets: Peeping Tom, Nele Dirckx, Yves Leirs and Frederik Liekens / Lighting: Filip Timmerman Yves Leirs / Costumes: Diane Fourdrignier and HyoJung Jang

From 11th to 15th September 2018 Ballet of the Opéra de LyonAs part of the Dance Biennale Inspired from 32 rue Vandenbranden by Peeping Tom

Creation by Peeping TomThis is a virtual premiere for this company based in the suburbs of Brussels, given that Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier do not usually work with opera ballets, except for adaptations, as was already the case for this opus at the Gotebörg Opera in 2013. In this version, some of the six original characters are multiplied, thus highlighting the fantastical aspect of a piece which is rooted in the aesthetics of the magnificent film by Shohei Imamura, The Ballad of Narayama. In the hyper-realistic sets, showing a chaotic, cold and windy landscape, there appear wrecked caravans and makeshift shelters. The inhabitants dwell there, isolated and stuck, like a community of disinherited young people shifting around and breaking up as the world changes. The extremely physical, and absolutely acrobatic approach of Peeping Tom is mingled with a dark, melancholy poetry that chimes with the expressionist current, while also being deeply based in the style of today’s road-movies, which can be extraordinarily offbeat while remaining clearly based in our era. The Opera is also hosting, as part of the Dance Biennale of 2018, a new piece by Rachid Ouramdane: Franchir la nuit.

Franchir la nuitWith Annie Hanauer, Deborah Lennie‑Bisson, Ruben Sanchez, Leandro Villavicencio, Aure Wachter and a hoard of children World premiereConception and choreography: Rachid OuramdaneAssisted by: Agalie Vandamme

Musical composition: Deborah Lennie-Bisson / Video-maker: Mehdi Meddaci / Sets: Sylvain Giraudeau / Lighting: Stéphane Graillot / Sound: Laurent Lechenault / Costumes: Sigolène Petey

Production: CCN2- Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble – Direction: Yoann Bourgeois and Rachid OuramdaneA coproduction with Bonlieu, Scène Nationale d’Annecy, Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, Théâtre de la Ville - Paris, Théâtre national de Chaillot, Théâtre national de Bretagne - Rennes, Festival Bolzano Danza / Tanz Bozen

20th and 21st September 2018 CCN2-Centre chorégraphique national de GrenobleAs part of the Dance Biennale

Cinderella Choreography and Director: Maguy Marin / Music: Sergei Prokofiev (op.87, 1940/1944)Additional sound sequences: Jean Schwartz / Sets and costumes: Montserrat Casanova / Masks: Monique Luyton / Lighting: John Spradbery

From 30th October to 3rd November 2018 Ballet of the Opéra de Lyon

Cinderella is backIt is impossible to weary of this rereading of the Maguy Marin repertory piece. Premiered in 1985 at the request of Françoise Adret, who was then the director of the Ballet, at a time when Maguy Marin was far from being worshipped and respected as she is today, but instead controversial and irreverent, this commission was a stroke of genius. 35 years later, this Cinderella which set off a revolution in the world of Ballet is still fresh. Transposed into a toy shop with wooden soldiers and grotesque dolls, Maguy Marin’s Cinderella is a rebel pointing at a consumerist and disembodied world. This seems even sharper today, with masks and ungainly figures, stuffed into plump doll costumes designed by Montserrat Casanova. As a violent attack against conventions and the consumer society, this Cinderella is also a philosophical and poetic tale that sends its message beyond words and borders.

Dance / Ballet of the Opéra de LyonThe new season of the Ballet of the Opéra de Lyon has been placed under the sign of history. The history of contemporary dance in the second half of the 20th century, above all in America, with the arrival in the repertory of a piece by Merce Cunningham and another by Trisha Brown, as well as two by Jiří Kylián, the Ballet’s associate artist. The revival of Cinderella is always an event, given that this

emblematic piece by the Ballet is one of its best-sellers with over 400 performances since 29th November 1985, when it was premiered. Meanwhile the creation by the Belgian company Peeping Tom which will open the season of the Opera de Lyon and the Dance Biennale, will bring to the ball the entirety of the Ballet with 31, rue Vandenbranden, an adaptation of a piece created in 2009, 32, rue Vandenbranden.


Merce Cunningham AnniversaryIn the context of the celebrations of the centenary of Merce Cunningham’s birth and of the Cunningham Foundation

SummerspaceChoreography: Merce Cunningham / Music: Morton Feldman, Ixion / Sets, costumes: Robert Rauschenberg / Lighting: Aaron Copp

ExchangeChoreography: Merce Cunningham / Music: David Tudor, Weatherings / Sets, costumes and Lighting: Jasper Johns

From 9th to 11th November 2018 Ballet of the Opéra de LyonA programme presented as part of the "postmodern dance" archipelago of the Maison de la Danse

Merce Cunningham EveningWhile the world of dance is getting ready to celebrate the centenary of Merce Cunningham’s birth in 2019, the Ballet has taken the initiative to devise another evening for this master from New York, with the arrival in the repertory of Exchange, a 1978 piece, premiered on 27th September at the City Center Theater in New-York. Exchange is a pure historical pearl. The quintessence of the Cunningham style, the encounter of his basic principles, with randomness and changes of perspective – in which none of the performers is more important than the others, and in which all of them can become the centre of attention. Without forgetting the soundtrack by David Tudor, a great regular of Cunningham’s productions (when it was not John Cage, the company’s incumbent composer) and then the successor to Cage as the director of the company, with a scenography by Jasper Johns, another faithful collaborator with the choreographer. Summerspace, premiered 20 years later, and entering into the ballet’s repertory in June 2012, is also at the summit of this genre. In front of an abstract pointillist set by Robert Rauschenberg, the dancers explode into leaps and suspensions, while exploring all the directions of space, and displaying an abstract, poetic dance.

Homage to Trisha Brown NewarkChoreography: Trisha Brown / Sound conception and sets: Donald Judd / Lighting: Ken Tabachnick

Foray Forêt Choreography: Trisha Brown / Music: Fanfare / Sets and costumes: Robert Rauschenberg / Lighting: Robert Rauschenberg and Spencer Brown

Set and Reset/ ResetChoreography: Trisha Brown / Music: Laurie Anderson / Scenography: Michael Meyers / Costumes: Adeline André / Lighting: Patrice Besombes / Based on an original idea of Robert Rauschenberg

At la Maison de la Danse From 24th to 26th January 2019 Ballet of the Opéra de Lyon

Trisha Brown EveningJanuary will see an evening entirely devoted to the great lady of American post-modern dance, Trisha Brown. Newark is the first piece by Trisha Brown to enter the repertory of the Ballet of the Opéra de Lyon, the first too that she agreed to give over to a company other than hers. On a soundtrack by Donald Judd, who also created the scenography of strips of primary colours that lift and descend to change the space, two male and four female dancers slice up the air, tracing out figures and dialoguing with the colours, displaying the differences between male strength and power, and the fluidity of female movement. Meanwhile, Set and Reset/Reset is staged in black and white, with arrays of grey vaporous costumes by Robert Rauschenberg, the fellow traveller of the choreographer who died in March 2017, on some magical music by Laurie Anderson. As a manifesto piece, entering the repertory in 2005, it gives off the pure pleasure of dancing and remains a major piece 35 years after its creation. Then there is Foray Forêt, which premiered in Lyon in 1990 during the Biennale devoted to American dance, which is opening the cycle Back to Zero, with ever-more unwound but also abstract gestures, that return to the basic notion of weight.

The Ballet of the Opéra de Lyon is amongst “the top 10 dance shows of 2017”:

The New York Times selected Summerspace by Merce Cunningham, whilst on tour in New York

in March 2017.


Jiří Kylián Evening ‑ Après HierFalling AngelsChoreography: Jiří KyliánMusic: Steve Reich, Drumming / part I (1970/71) Music for four percussionists / Costumes: Joke Visser / Lighting: Jiří Kylián (concept), Joost Biegelaar (technical production)

14’20’’ – extract from the duo of 27’52’’ Choreography: Jiří Kylián / Music: Dirk Haubrich (new composition, based on 2 themes by Gustav Mahler) / Sets: Jiří Kylián / Costume design: Joke Visser / Lighting: Tjebbes / Technical production: Joost Biegelaar

Petite MortChoreography: Jiří Kylián / Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano concerto n° 23 in A major K.488 – Adagio, Piano concerto n° 21 in C major K. 467 – Andante / Sets: Jiří Kylián / Costumes: Joke Visser / Lighting: Jiří Kyliánn (concept) / Joop Caboort (adaptation) / Technical production: Joost Biegelaar

Au Toboggan, Décines From 4th to 6th April 2019 Ballet of the Opéra de Lyon

Jiří Kylián Evening ‑ Avant DemainBella FiguraChoreography: Jiří Kylián / Music: Lukas Foss, Lento and andante, extracts from the Salomon Rossi Suite – 1975; Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Ouverture and quando corpus, extracts from Stabat Mater – 1736; Alessandro Marcello, Andante from the Concerto for two mandolins and strings RV 532 – circa 1720 ; Antonio Vivaldi, Grave from the Concerto Grosso Op. 8 n°6 - 1698 / Scenography: Jiří Kylián / Lighting: Jiří Kylián (concept) / Kees Tjebbes (adaptation) / Technical production: Kees Tjebbes / Costumes: Joke Visser

Wings of WaxChoreography by Jiří Kylián/ Music: Heinrich von Biber: Passacaglia for solo violin (1676), John Cage: Prelude for Meditation for prepared piano (1946/48), Philip Glass: Movement III from String Quartet no. 5 (1991), Johann Sebastian Bach: Variation no. 25, Adagio, in G minor from the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1742) / Sets: Michael Simon / Lighting: Michael Simon (concept) / Kees Tjebbes (adaptation) / Technical production: Kees Tjebbes / Costumes: Joke Visser

Gods And DogsChoreography: Jiří Kylián / Music: Jiří Kylián concept), Dirk Haubrich (composition); Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet Opus 18, Nr. 1 in F-major, Movement I, Allegro con brio and Movement II, Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato / Computer controlled projection: Tatsuo Unemi, Daniel Bisig / Video projection: Dag Johan Haugerud, Cecilie Semec / Costumes: Joke Visser / Sets: Jiří Kylián / Lighting and technical production: Kees Tjebbes

From 16th to 19th April 2019 Ballet of the Opéra de Lyon

KyliánResidency

Jiří Kylián in the Limelight

Spring will present the chance to see again two pieces by the Czech choreographer which are already in the repertory, Petite Mort in an initial programme and Bella Figura in the second. And to discover three others: Falling Angels, Wings of Wax and Gods and Dogs, created respectively in 1989, 1997 and 2008. This is an occasion to examine the evolution of Kylián’s style as it can be seen throughout pieces that are marked, as ever, by a quite extraordinary musicality, but also a freedom and a lightness that increases over time. It is as if the older he gets,

this choreographer grants himself more and more fantasy and experimentation, as can be seen in the cacti worn by the performers in Wings of Wax or the astonishing assemblage of music by Cage and Bach in Gods and Dogs. As a dive into the world of this associated artist of the Ballet, these two evenings draw up a detailed portrait of his work, meaning being able to admire its multiples facets and measure their value. Gallia Valette-Pilenko

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 20 Concert

ConcertsSandrine Piau ConcertStefano Montanari, conductorSandrine Piau, sopranoOrchestra of the Opéra de Lyon I Bollenti Spiriti

Georg Friedrich Handel– Rodelinda, overture– Scipione, “Scoglio d’immota fronte”– Concerto grosso op.3 n°2– Rodelinda “Ombre Piante”– Esther: symphonies– Ariodante, overture– Alcina, “Mi restano le lagrime”– Concerto grosso Alexander Feast– Aci, Galatea e Polifemo “Verso gia l’alma col sangue”– Il trionfo del tempo “Una schiera di pace”

Tuesday 18th September 2018, 8 pm

Schéhérazade Concert Daniele Rustioni, conductorVéronique Gens, sopranoOrchestra of the Opéra de Lyon

Alexander BorodinIn the Steppes of Central AsiaMaurice RavelShéhérazadeNikolai Rimsky-KorsakovShéhérazade

Sunday 23rd September 2018, 4 pm

Gala night at the Opéra de LyonDaniele Rustioni, pianoFrancesca Dego, violinAnd the soloists of the Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon

Mikhail Glinka, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Maurice Ravel

Thursday 8th November 2018

Christmas Concert Karine Locatelli, conductorOrchestra and Children’s Choir of the Opéra de Lyon

At Saint‑Bonaventure church, Lyon 2e Sunday 16th and 23rd December 2018, 4 pm

Charlie Chaplin Plays in a ConcertCiné-Concert Chaplin

Jean Deroyer, conductorOrchestra of the Opéra de Lyon

The Adventurer (1917)The Fireman (1916)The Rink (1916)

At the Théâtre de La Renaisssance, OullinsWednesday 19th December 2018, 7 pmFriday 21st December 2018, 8pmSaturday 1st December 2018, 4 pm and 8 pm

Recital Felicity Lott Felicity Lott, soprano

Sunday 30th December 2018, 4 pm

New Year ConcertWaltz at the Opera


Monday 31st December 2018, 8 pm

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 21 Concert

Choral women’s chorusDan Juris, conductor Women’s chorus of the Opéra de Lyon

Johannes Brahms and Gustav Holst

Tuesday 22nd January 2019, 8 pm

Boléro ConcertDaniele Rustioni, conductorOrchestra of the Opéra de Lyon

Nikolai Rimsky-KorsakovCapriccio espagnol Manuel da FallaLove the MagicianClaude DebussyImagesMaurice RavelBolero

Thursday 7th February 2019, 8 pm

Krystian Zimerman RecitalKrystian Zimerman, piano

Sunday 28th April 2019, 4 pm

Coronation Music for Louis XIVSébastien Daucé, conductor

Correspondances Ensemble and ChoirAnd Chlidren’s Choir of the Opéra de Lyon

In Chapelle de la Trinité, LyonThursday 23rd May 2019, 8 pm

Chamber Music CycleProgrammes on Saturdays and Sundays, 1 hour of music with the musicians of the Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon in the Grand Studio of the Ballet.

Manuel da Falla, Henri Dutilleux, Jacques Ibert and Jean-Marie LeclairSaturday 13rd October at 4.30 pm and Sunday 21st October 2018 at 11.30 am

Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Luciano BerioSunday 18th November 2018 at 11.30 am

Carl Loewe and Franz LehárSaturday 15th December at 4.30 pm and Sunday 23th December 2018 at 11.30 am

Darius Milhaud and Heitor Villa-LobosSaturday 27th January at 4.30 pm and Sunday 2nd February 2019 at 11.30 am

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Johannes BrahmsSaturday 23rd March at 4.30 pm and Sunday 31st March 2019 at 11.30 am

Miloslav Ištvan, Edison Denisov, Philippe Hurel, Philip Parker, William Woods and Hiroshi TerashimaSaturday 18th May at 4.30 pm and Sunday 26th May 2019 at 11.30 am

Sergio Menozzi, Max Bruch and Dmitri ShostakovichSunday 16th June at 11.30 am and Saturday 22nd June 2019 at 4.30 pm


ToursOperaEdinburgh FestivalLa Cenerentola(Stefan Herheim / Stefano Montanari)24th, 25th and 26th August 2018

Royal Opera House Muscat, OmanA Night in Venice(Peter Langdal/ Daniele Rustioni)29th and 30th November 2018

Opéra de VichyThe Return of Ulysses(William Kentridge/Philippe Pierlot)March 2019

Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceTosca(Christophe Honoré / Daniele Rustioni)July 2019

Chorégies d’OrangeDon GiovanniOrchestra of the Opéra de Lyon2nd and 6th August 2019

RuhrtriennaleDido and Æneas(David Marton / Pierre Bleuse)29th, 30th and 31st August 2018

Ballet of the Opéra de LyonTrois Grandes Fugues(Lucinda Childs, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker et Maguy Marin)Festival Tanz im August, Berlin: 10th, 11th and 12th August 2018Amsterdam, Stadsschouwburg: 18th and 19th September 2018

Cinderella(Maguy Marin)Théâtre des Champs‑Elysées, Paris: 27th, 28th and 29th September 2018

Under the day, No More Play, Petite mort(Johan Inger/Jiří Kylián)Théâtre de Nîmes : 20th et 21st November 2018Opéra de Lille : 31st January, 1st et 2nd February 2019

Summerspace, Exchange(Merce Cunningham)DeSingel, Anvers: 28th, 29th and 30th November 2018MC2 Grenoble: 28th and 29th May 2019Montpellier Danse Festival: from 22nd to 30th June 2019

Dance(Lucinda Childs)Théâtre d’Orléans: 20th and 21st December 2018Odyssud, Blagnac, Toulouse: 6th, 7th and 8th February 2019Théatre Les Gémeaux, Sceaux: 17th,18th and 19th May 2019

Dance(Lucinda Childs)Set and Reset/Reset(Trisha Brown)Teatro municipal, Porto: from 16th to 17th February 2019Teatros del Canal, Madrid: from 20th to 21st February 2019

Bella Figura, Wings of Wax, Petite Mort(Jiří Kylián)Liceu, Barcelona: 25th, 26th, 27th and 28th April 2019

No more play - Wings of Wax ‑ Gods and Dogs(Jiří Kylián)Espace des Arts, Chalon‑sur‑Saône: 10th May 2019

ConcertsBerlioz ConcertLa Côte-Saint-André: Saturday 1st September 2018 at 9 pm

Sandrine Piau ConcertOpéra de Dijon: Sunday 16th September 2018 at 4pmMaison de Radio‑France, Paris: Wednesday 19th September 2018 at 8pm

NabuccoThéâtre des Champs‑Elysées, Paris: Friday 9th November 2018 at 8pmOpéra de Vichy: Sunday 11th November 2018 at 3pm

Scheherazade ConcertRoyal Opera House Mascat, Oman: Saturday 1st December 2018 at 8pm

Boléro ConcertGrenoble:Tuesday 12nd February 2019

Chamber MusicAt the festival de la Baume:Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd June 2019

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 23 Underground Opera

Underground OperaOpera Underground puts on music above all, in the Amphitheatre, but also in the main auditorium, under the Peristyle in summer, or else in the Muses.

Clearly visible in the city, as a flagship and icon, the Opéra de Lyon is where everyone can meet up and frequent one another. Its mission is to serve and be open to all kinds of audiences – on eighteen floors.

At the summit, under the glass roof, there are the Ballet’s dancers, on the third floor, the main auditorium, the orchestra, singers and stage.

And then, buried, there is the Underground Opera, the Opera’s other stage. The other stage is among others the Amphitheatre – a 200-seat auditorium located in the second basement – literally underground. But the Undergroung Opera is above all a new approach, a new artistic programming that reflects the world and its music and that will extend beyond the basement to various spaces of the Opera house.

It is often now forgotten that the opera is also a popular art from. From the pit to the balconies, historically, opera represents all the city’s classes. Italians remember this a little.

The mission of this other opera stage is precisely to bring together artistic expressions, aimed at a large number of audiences, which are seemingly disparate: a kind of underground mirror of the city and the world it is set in.

Music which is called “world” –simply because it was created, by musicians, somewhere in the world… And other types that might be called jazz – though jazz is particularly hard to define.

But, above all, what these types of music have in common is that they were created today, by musicians fascinated by hybrid forms; musicians who grew up in jazz, rock, or classical music; musicians who have studied the music of previous generations, but also the music of their neighbours, and their neighbours’ neighbours; musicians for whom old dichotomies are no longer really relevant: intellectual or popular, traditional or modern music. Worldwide, new generations have drunk from many springs, and the result is a musical output which is often exceptional, remaining sometimes hard to catalogue. What these types of music have in common is that were conceived by artists who are looking out to renew, or reinvent, the music they have inherited.

This is not new. Throughout history musicians have been inspired – sometimes with the risk of plagiarism – by other people’s music: the gamelan for Debussy, Brazilian music for Milhaud, Hungarian folklore airs for Bartók, jazz for Stravinsky – to mention only the classics; but also Peruvian waltzes for Chileans, zouk from the Antilles for Colombians, the Cuban sound for the Senegalese, military marches for Balkan musicians, yéyé for Cambodians or Bollywood music for the Kronos Quartet. The list of such inter-fertilisations is almost infinite.

Underground Opera hopes to do justice to these new generations by presenting forms of music that ally tradition with iconoclasm, virtuosity with sobriety and the energy of popular music with the harmonic richness of more classic music.

Stay tuned!

Concerts in the main auditorium22nd September 2018Rachid Taha: 20 years of Diwan. With the participation of Steve Hillage.In homage to the album “Diwan” which, 20 years ago, created a bridge between the music of the first generations of North African immigrants and their children - between rock and chaabi, French and Arabic. 18th October 2018Portenos: from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso with Melingo and Bloque Depresivo.With the participation of the Quatuor Wassily.Music from two South-American ports that allies civic pride with a taste for music tinged with imports.

In the AmphitheatreAn eclecticism coming from traditions but turned towards the future. With concerts of world music, hybrid music, traditional music, jazz and so on.With, among others: Marc Ribot, Meridian Brothers, Terry Riley, Ben Sidran, Mdou Moctar,Louis Sclavis, Alash, Sarah Murcia and Kamilya Jubran, Hailu Mergia.

And then shows for a young audience, talks, projections, and encounters.

Le PéristyleA summer series with 25 distinct dates:Jazz from Lyon, New York, or Ethiopia. Columbian Bullerengue, Afrobeat, an Italian ball – and much else.

Les MusesDJ evenings including Crate Robber, a monthly series devoted to the Afro-Latin vinyl of the 70s.

Radio D.I.V.A.Programmes chiming with the operas performed in the main auditorium.

The Quatuor WassilyIn partnership with the CNSMD, Opera Underground is hosting the Quatuor Wassily who will be in residency during the 18/19 season.On the programme: collaborations with artists passing through, coming from varied traditions, and two concerts in the amphitheatre including an eclectic repertory and commissioned pieces.

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 24 The Lyon Opera House seen by

The Lyon Opera House seen by John AllisonIt was only after the jury of the International Opera Awards named Opéra de Lyon as Opera Company of the Year in 2017 that we realized it was the first time the award was going to a French house. That fact had not been a part of the discussion — we were looking for a theatre that stood out internationally, not only in national terms — but the choice was also a reminder of just how distinctive Opéra de Lyon is. That character has also emerged increasingly in recent years in reviews in the pages of Opera, and it was echoed by the jury, made up of industry professionals and leading critics.

But it is not only jurors and journalists who respond to stimulating programming. Looking on as an outsider, one of the striking things about Opéra de Lyon is not only how it appears to play to fuller houses than many companies, but how those audiences appear to be younger than many. There is a definite ‘buzz’ that suggests that Lyon itself appreciates the quality of the performances too — yet perhaps it takes an outsider to see how rare that can be, and how opera in Lyon has its own unique signature.

How exactly does Opéra de Lyon achieve this? The first thing that strikes an observer of the operatic scene is the sense in which the programming of Serge Dorny and his colleagues is so carefully curated. An Opéra de Lyon season always manages to make connections between well-known masterpieces and lesser-known rarities, even new creations (and few houses manage to satisfy all those categories so consistently). It manages to mix major artists, including

some of the most significant stage directors of our day, with exciting new talents. Sometimes the talent is both major and still youthful, as in the case of the music director, Daniele Rustioni. Nearly four years since his debut in Lyon, he has stamped his mark on the theatre in a fascinatingly wide variety of repertoire. The partnership between Dorny and Rustioni has given rise to a musical and theatrical collaboration that is taking the theatre to new heights.

Two further features of Opéra de Lyon’s work stand out, making it different to other leading houses around the world. One is the flexibility of its Studio, run along different lines to many young artists’ programmes and able to contribute more organically than most to the life of the theatre. If it offers shorter contracts than is typical elsewhere, that is because they are more tailored to the talents and needs of young artists, who become a more integral part of the programming than in many theatres. Then there is the annual spring Festival — a mini-season within the season — which through its unusually high level of joined-up programming brings an all-too-uncommon philosophical element into the opera house. Few theatres are indeed as internationally connected yet self-sufficient and rooted in the cities they serve as Opéra de Lyon.

John AllisonEditor, OperaChairman of the jury of the International Opera Awards

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 25 The Lyon Opera House seen by

The Lyon Opera House seen by Eleonore BüningGood old opera has an image problem. Currently, the word still chimes to the ears of many municipal financers as being synonymous with superfluous luxury. And it still happens that the small or great opera houses all around the world have constantly to justify their partly subsided existence and, as opposed to cinematographic bodies or sports stadia for example, to contradict insinuations stating that they satisfy only a bourgeois elite; this sometimes leads to strangely defensive contortions in their programmes. In his book Walküre in Detmold [The Valkyrie in Detmold], Ralph Bollmann calculated that yearly there were as many spectators that visited a German musical theatre as the stadia of the German football league, i.e. ten million people.For historical reasons, in France there are currently fewer opera houses than in Germany. But there is one that shines more than the others thanks to its exemplary nature. It is the prototype of a popular and bourgeois house, sure of itself, polyvalent, firmly anchored in the culture of its city and region, while paying no attention to quotas, without trying to negotiate twists and turns in its programing, and set rather at the centre of real life’s artistic questions. Even wandering critics, opera professionals who travel a lot, are always amazed and moved by what happens at the Opéra de Lyon. What activity! And cult locations, worthy of the cinema! And young people! Anyone who comes in here will abandon any doubts about the future of the opera.Jean Nouvel’s extremely dramatic architecture stages the audience’s arrival as though in a show. The half-ton dome, that crowns this building, enlarging it by several floors, attracts stares every night over the old town, like an emblem and, within, in the dark space that absorb the light, everyone’s attention is at once focused on the essential: music. Like shreds of magnetic metal, eyes and ears turn towards the sparkling zone of light on stage when the curtain comes up.Serge Dorny, who has been its director since 2003, has often explained to me how he started to change the structure of the

audience: it was a long-term project. Ever since, almost half the spectators are under forty-five, there is a large number of teenagers as well as twenty-year-olds. But there still remains a hint of mystery, because the same means have already been tried out elsewhere, but with far less success. The fact that the reservation rates for shows reach ninety percent is unprecedented. In comparison, in Germany, the great opera houses consider it to be a success if they reach eighty percent. This is why, when Lyon first provided me with its statistics in a press release, I thought that the numbers were too good to be true, that they were objectives or a trick close to propaganda. I know now that the numbers are correct. I have often been right in the middle of a young audience, for virtually sell-out shows – and this was not on opening nights.And why do we, as critics, go so often to Lyon? Well, to tell the truth, it’s not really for the beautiful young people; we are fine as we are together. It’s the pieces we don’t yet know and the daring casting that attract us; it is the professionalism used in the productions. And it is the ambitious discourse about an opera programme, often politically motivated, in which come out again and again topics focused on content, or crossed thinking, like utopian islands hung in the air.Rediscoveries and opening nights have become Lyon’s trade mark. Of course, not everything will work out. But among a clutch of memorable events, which are deeply embedded because they raised questions and gave a new direction to the mind (the ones I’d definitely take with me to my desert island), several come from Lyon: Peter Stein’s “Lulu”, Castellucci’s “Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher”, the rediscovery of “Elektra” by Ruth Berghaus, the wild and bad “Roi Carotte” ... This has nothing to do with luxury. It is a way to gain knowledge and a way of life, nourishment, in the finest sense of the term.

Eleonore BüningCritic, working with the review Operwelt and the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 26 Sponsors & partners

Sponsors & partnersThe Opéra de Lyon warmly thanks its sponsors and partners for their trust and generosity.

For many years, both enterprises and foundations have shared our project and our values. Their support and commitment are essential for carrying out the Opéra de Lyon’s project to attain artistic excellence while practising an openness to all publics: artistic creation, training young talents in the Children’s Choir and the Opera’s Studio, cultural and educational actions in schools and for socially-challenged audiences, accessibility to the handicapped, openness to the young, major free encounters open to all.

Contact: Judith Moreau Sponsors – Enterprises Department Manager Tel: +33 (0)4 72 00 47 92 [email protected]

Sponsors

Media Partners

Founding sponsor

Duos of Trades Sponsors

Opera and Digital Sponsor

Big Screen Opera Sponsors

School Programme Sponsor

Skills sponsors

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 27 Cultural and educative actions

Cultural and educative actionsWith a view to reaching out to each of us, in 2003 the Opéra de Lyon set up a cultural development pole. This service conceives and puts into action cultural and artistic schemes. Each season, it carries out approximately twenty projects, in the opera house, or off-site, in association with over 250 partners and bringing in at least 34,000 participants.

Missions and AudienceThe aim of these projects is to allow the young and other people affected by an inequality of access to cultural sites to make the best of a favourable access to the opera house thanks to experiences based on variable dimensions and contents (shows, discovery of the backstage, workshops, participatory projects…), which are also multi-disciplinary – chiming with the identity of the Opéra de Lyon.

Partners and TerritoriesBringing to life the resources of the opera house, as well as those of independent artistic teams, each of these projects has been elaborated in concertation with our partners (state education, popular education, town planning, social development, medicine, etc.) and public bodies, while taking into account their particularities, issues and needs.

Over the years, several of them have become special partners of the cultural development pole: Pentes de la Croix-Rousse and the town Vénissieux, as well as, more recently, the 8e arrondissement and Saint-Fons; while awaiting fresh developments, which are ongoing with the town of Feyzin, and rural territories in the north of Isère.

Education School seasonThe opera house shares with state education objectives which are both artistic and cultural. Coming from the territories of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, over 15,000 students from primary to high school are welcomed, each season, to shows showing off the opera, dance, or else concerts... in the main auditorium, the amphitheatre and off-site.

Accompaniment with the Children’s ChoirThe house has adopted the mission of receiving in its Children’s Choir participants from every social level. Specific actions have been adopted to ease access to this educative approach for children living in priority areas.

HandicapThe opera house has been developing its actions aimed at facilitating the reception and access to shows and cultural projects for people who are handicapped. There were 360 people thus concerned in 2016-2017.

Health and the medico-socialThe opera house has become involved with medico-social and health bodies to build up artistic and cultural projects: with a journey of discovery of the backstage and shows, off-site actions, or training aimed at carers. 5 partner institutions and 438 people were concerned by these actions in 2016-2017.

InclusionThe opera house conducts actions aimed at people involved in inclusion projects and social-professional training. This is a journey mingling a discovery of the world of the opera, its crafts, and artistic practices. Some participants take a course at the opera house after this journey. 15 partner institutions and 457 participants were concerned by these actions in 2016-2017.

Justice The opera house conducts actions in partnership with the SPIP (Service Pénitentiaire d’Insertion et de Probation) and schools, in association with prison services: concerts, reception at the opera house of inmates for visits and professional encounters, a raising of awareness among the staff of the establishments. 90 people were concerned by these actions in the 2016-2017 season.

As a familyDiscovery Workshops and CoursesThe opera house offers workshops and courses for an initiation to artistic practices, led by artists, for children aged between 5 and 15, at weekends and during school holidays. 160 participants in 2016-2017.

The Fêtes Escales concertEach year, for the festival Fêtes Escales in Vénissieux, there is a free, open-air concert given by Opéra de Lyon. 500 spectators in 2017.

Participatory projects Duos of craftsA creative project conceived by the composer Nicolas Bianco which associated the artisans and tradespeople of Lyon, 340 junior-high school students from the Minguettes, along with adults seeking for socio-professional inclusion, and artists from the Opéra de Lyon.

The operatic and digital world An artistic and cultural project associated with a group of digital artists, Matrice, and aimed at 120 teenagers. This project takes place in three phases: actions at school, courses during school holidays and artistic residencies.

The Opera’s off side An artistic, civic project in collaboration with the association Eolo, which brings together professional artists and 4 classes, 2 of which are specialised (an ITEP and an ULIS group) based on creative artistic work concerning the season’s work, a trip taking in audiences and inter-class exchanges. In the background: the question of the struggle against exclusion.

Professional networks

The opera house participates in the dynamics of the following networks: – the FRANCAS (federation of popular education)– Lyon’s Charter of cultural cooperation– the cultural insertion mission of the MDEF– the higher education and research establishments

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 28 Major free encounters open to all

Major free encounters open to allArtistic excellence and an openness to the broadest possible audience is available for each action conducted by the Opéra de Lyon. Thanks to these major encounters which are free and open to all, there is an opportunity for as many people as possible to discover the backstage of our shows, as well as technical and artistic crafts.

Open houses: over 17,000 participantsDuring each season, our open houses provide the opportunity to discover the opera in terms of its crafts and knowhow. The objective of these two days: allowing the Opéra de Lyon to be discovered by a broad public thanks to varied propositions based on dance and music, with in particular practical artistic or technical workshops.

Heritage days: over 8,000 visitorsDuring two days, more than 8,000 visitors came to discover Jean Nouvel’s building, at the crossroads between architectural and artistic innovation. Guided visits by the Opéra de Lyon’s moderators allowed for a discovery of the back alleys of a performance site.

The video-transmission of an opera in Auvergne- Rhône-Alpes: almost 8,000 spectatorsThe main principles of this project: - decentralisation, to wipe out distances and encounter the region’s public; - freeness, to favour access for everyone and share with the most possible people the brilliance of a show; - everywhere, when possible, in the open air, with the idea of a universal summer festival, with a starry sky as the background; - the choice of a popular work targeting the sensitivity of the greatest number of people.

The show is performed in the main auditorium of the Opéra de Lyon and broadcast by satellite live in the partner towns in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.In 2018, Mozart’s Don Giovanni will be broadcast on Saturday 7 th July.

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 29 The Opera in figures

The Opera in figuresCultural and educational activities1

EducationHandicap: 360 people Health and medical-social: 438 peopleInsertion: 457 participants Justice: 90 people

Participatory projectsDuo of trades: 340 junior high-school studentsOpera and digital: 120 teenagersOff-stage opera: 4 classes

The major encounters, open to everyoneOpen-house days:17,000 participantsHeritage days: 8,000 visitorsVideo-transmission: 8,000 spectators

Guided tours of the Opera houseGroup visits - more than 200 groups = about 5.000 visitorsIndividual visits - about 1.400 visitors

Activity and frequentation2

Main theatre Performances Spectators Operas 59 53 693Ballets 24 16 676Concerts 7 7 025Total 90 77 394

Chamber music Performances Spectators 12 1 208

Schools Performances Spectators 18 8 287

Amphitheatre Performances Spectators 124 22 266

Peristyle Performances Spectators 74 32 930

Les Muses Performances Spectators 3 600

Other sites in Lyon Performances Spectators 20 9 084

Tours Performances Spectators Opera 2 1 023Ballets 38 33 443Concerts 7 10 387Chamber music 3 1 180+ schools Total 50 46 033

Total 391 197 802

1 Figures based on Season 2016-172 Figures based on the year 2017

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 30 The Opera in figures

Financial means*

Overall budget36,835,434 €

Public finance18,210,713 €

The budget*

ReceiptsOwn resources 6,975,102 €Ticket sales 3,430,218 €Tour revenues 1,546,466Other income 1,998,418 €Conventional subsidies 18,210,713 €State 5,919,507 €Ville de Lyon 6,621,472 €Département 2,859,344 €Region 2,810,390 €Other public assistance 11,649,619 €Provision of personnel / City of Lyon 10,241,398 €Personnel subsidy / City of Lyon 1,374,312 €Exceptional subsidies 33,909 €

Total receipts 36,835,434 €

Expenditure Production costs 11,159,315 €Permanent personnel 15,971,728 €Occasional and extra personnel 2,312,462 €Operating costs 3,192,647 €Exploitation of buildings 3,683,433 €Depreciations and funds 514,267 €Transfer of reserves 1,582 €

Total expenditure 36,835,434 €

Human resources*

City of Lyon61 %

Greater Lyon10 %

City of Lyon49.5 % Region

7.6 %

Greater Lyon7.8 %

Own income18.9 %

State16.1 %

State20 %

Region9 %

Category Permanent staff Full-time equivalent staff*

Full-time equivalent extra staff

Full-time equivalent total1

Artistic personnel 165 160.4 58.02 218.11including : – Orchestra 62 61.40 11.02 72.42including : – Chorus 35 32.34 11.86 44.20including : – Ballet 32 33.69 0,14 33.83including : – Other Artists 3 1.99 27.11 29.11including : – Management 33 30.66 7.89 38.55

Administration 26 26.24 1.41 27.65Communication 51 33.26 4.88 38.14Technical 107 95.39 55,05 150.44

Total 349 314.98 119.35 434.33

* Figures based on the year 20171 Full-time equivalent

Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 31

The Opera in practiceBuying tickets to shows

Opening dates for reservationsSeason-tickets as of 3rd May 2018 at noon(on wwww.opera-lyon.com or by post)Unit ticket sales as 2nd June 2018 at noon

At the Opera’s ticket houseFrom noon to 7pm from Tuesday to Saturday (and on Mondays on performance days).One hour before each performance (for tickets to that day’s performance only)The ticket service is open on the off-premises sites 1h before each show

At 04 69 85 54 54From noon to 7pm from Tuesday to Saturday (and on Mondays on performance days).

opera‑lyon.com

General Director: Serge Dorny

Communication media: Pierre Collet Tel. +33 (0)1 40 26 35 26 [email protected]

Contact: Sophie Jarjat Press service Tel. +33 (0)4 72 00 45 82 [email protected]

Opéra de Lyon Place de la Comédie – BP 1219 69 203 Lyon cedex 01 – France

Press Kit Season 2018 –19 · 2018-03-17 · Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 3 Editorial In over...

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Transcript of Press Kit Season 2018 –19 · 2018-03-17 · Opéra de Lyon Season 2018 — 19 3 Editorial In over...