2023-09-16 08:00:44
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Brussels. The Mint. 10-IX-2023. Bernard Foccroule (born in 1953): Cassandra, opera in a prologue and thirteen scenes, with an original libretto by Matthew Jocelyn. Direction and videos: Marie-Ève Signeyrole. Decor: Fabien Teigné. Costumes: Yashi. Lighting: Philippe Berthomé. With: Katarina Baradic, Cassandra; Jessica Niles, Sandra; Susan Bickley, Hecuba/Victoria; Sarah Defrise, Naomi; Paul Appleby, Blake; Joshua Hopkins, Appolo and an angry audience member; Gidon Saks, Priam/Alexander; Sandrine Mairesse, Stage Manager/Marjorie; Lisa Willems, the conference presenter. Choir of the Opéra de la Monnaie (conductor: Emmanuel Trenque). La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra, conductor: Kasushi Ono
It has become a tradition: La Monnaie de Bruxelles opens its season with the creation of a new opera. In this autumn, it is Cassandra by Bernard Foccroulle, with a libretto by Matthew Jocelyn, in the refined staging of Marie-Ève Signeyrole and the spartan sets of Fabien Teigné, which opens the ball.
Rare are the opera stewards who order from their predecessor! Peter de Caluwe, at the start of the Covid crisis, solicited the talents of Bernard Foccroulle, also the organist and teacher and former director of institutions that we know, for the writing of an opera, the first to his catalog created a few weeks before his seventieth birthday. The libretto by Canadian Matthew Jocelyn, skillfully braids, but not without some avoidable lengths, ancient myth and climatic reality.
The opera (a short prologue and thirteen brief scenes linked together for an hour and a half of performance) therefore interweaves a double narrative framework through these historically distanced stories but skillfully embedded thanks to their mutual lighting. An antique choir, sometimes scattered throughout the room (from the floor to the hangers, or broken out onto the balcony) comments and unifies an action shaped by the sphericity of a universal time where accomplished past, anguished present and potential future become nothing more than ‘one, beyond the dramatic discontinuity desired by the librettist.
When the curtain rises, Cassandra (played by the Serbian mezzo soprano Katarina Bradic, suffocating with dramatic veracity, vocal beauty and theatrical involvement), screams in despair in front of the sack of Troy that she had announced without having been heard. Indeed, Apollo (the Canadian baritone Joshua Hopkins with a beautiful vocal vigor in total connection with the dark and predatory side of the character), to seduce her had endowed her with the gift of divination, but rejected, immediately spat in her face. mouth cursing her: no one will ever believe her prophecies.
The climatologist Sandra Seymour, played by the young American soprano Jessica Niels (ideal of versatility, between irony and dereliction, despite a slightly reduced vocal projection) embodies a Cassandra of modern times: she puts her science within everyone’s reach through her performance of stand-up comedy and warns of the dangers of climate change. Blake, a student of classical philology, a committed environmental activist (role assigned to the American Paul Appleby, very distinguished and stylish, defending the new score in the lineage of the great Mozartian tenor roles), is surprised then falls in love with the young academic. Sandra is immediately seduced and the couple settles down for the long term. An improbable birthday dinner serves as a family presentation: weary! it turns into a fiasco in the face of the incomprehension of a group of industrialists and financiers as climate-sceptical as they are voraciously pushy, if we perhaps except Sandra’s sister, Naomi, half hysterical, half saccharine, pregnant until with teeth – we don’t really know whose…- (beautifully played by the sparkling and tangy light soprano Sarah Defrise). The immediate response to this domestic verbal fistfight is the astonishing mythological encounter in the timeless Library of the Dead: Priam leafs through the works he inspired and reproaches his daughter Cassandra for having launched the curse described once morest him and his city. by many authors. Guided in his reflection by his wife Hecuba, he understood, but too late, that it was above all a matter of warning rather than condemning.
These are also the same singer-actors who symbolically embody the mythological couple and Sandra’s fifty-year-old parents: a Susan Bickley with a deliberately muted but timbrally moving presence remains lurking in the shadow of a slightly tired and more convincing as a haughty and wrathful father than as a hieratic deceased and dispossessed king. The young contemporary couple resolves to an increasingly determined activism (and increasingly misunderstood, given the suddenly more “serious” tone of the last stand-up), to the detriment of all of Blake’s procreative desires in the face of hesitation of her companion and until the final catastrophe: Sandra learns, at the moment when Naomi’s water breaks, that Blake’s boat, on its way to Antarctica, perhaps torpedoed, has sunk. Cassandra then appears between dream and reality as an empathetic tutelary and consoling figure to the unfortunate climatologist and reveals to her over the course of a sublime duet, the absolute summit of the score, that she will always be able to express herself: since no god has given her spat in the throat, no one will be able to prevent it from being one day, perhaps, heard.
The direction by Marie-Ève Signeyrole plays the economy card in a setting with multiple metamorphoses designed by Fabien Teigné. The informal mass of the curtain rise represents as much a shattered library as the gutted walls of an ancient city or even the ongoing liquefaction of an iceberg unwinding its seracs, then further on the interior of a hive whose hexagonal rays reflect also to the mythical infinite library of Babylon as imagined by Jorge Luis Borgès in his Fictions. The stage space is delimited in the background by white canvases that fade as the opera progresses. Live videos but also pre-recorded films or abstract computer animations complete the picture of this white apocalypse under the judicious lighting of Philippe Berthomé.
Bernard Foccroulle imagined a composite score, mixing references and musical styles, reflections of the disparity of a world of confrontations, broken up into “zones” both geographical and temporal – since Antiquity represented by the coruscating brass instruments of the capture of Troy inspired knowingly, he says, from Monteverdi, to the shores of pan-consonant post-modernity (we think more than once through the dense orchestral iridescence of the sonic discoveries of a Magnus Lindberg): elsewhere, the stand show -up takes place to music of almost entertainment, or even a lascivious saxophone (featuring Blake) interferes in the dense orchestral framework to represent the emerging passion between the future lovers or further their barely (dis)simulated antics, where marimbas (recalling so much the Messiaen of the Colors of the celestial city that the Boulez of theImprovisation III on Mallarmé ) represent Sandra’s spicy suavity and lively intelligence. As interludes, three “elytra music”, almost tachist, sort of nature rang all in micro intervals entrusted to very divided strings « on the bridge » et « trembling » less and less numerous over the course of their interventions, figure another ecological drama of our time: the disappearance of bees from our biosphere under the action of neurotoxic insecticides. But strictly speaking, Bernard Foccroulle only uses textual quotation twice: the lullaby Rock a bye baby entrusted to Naomi, in an almost Bergian harmonic context, and to punctuate both the death of Blake and the melting of the ice on the Bach platform (this cannot be made up!) in Antarctica the Lutheran chorale Oh how fleeting, oh how insignificant! : might a composer-organist imagine a musical world without the Cantor of Leipzig?
But the composer obviously proves to be a perfect connoisseur in love with the voice and singing both through respect for English prosody, the language chosen for the drama, and through the very stylish curve of each vocal line, often treated for itself, even in the most sentimental duets. No doubt by antonymy with the Prometheus by Luigi Nono, a “tragedy of not listening” is also eloquently mentioned in the presentation booklet of the show to explain the lyrical aesthetic made, with the exception of the duo of (Cas)Sandra, of the multilateral meeting unfathomable solitudes.
It is Kasushi Ono, one of the emblematic musical directors (2002-2008) of the Foccroulle era at La Monnaie, who has the formidable privilege of conducting the work at the baptismal font. He masterfully leads his troops to conquer this superb, very elaborate score, giving pride of place to unusual timbres (alto and bass flute, contrabass clarinet, etc.), and disciplinedly manages the contrasts dictated by the dramaturgy of the work. , from the intimacy of the most suave pianissimi to the implacable force of the most apocalyptic and boring tutti. Let us also salute the remarkable work of Emmanuel Trenque in the preparation of the choruses, this element by essence mediator, and essential to the success of this opera which is, to say the least, singular and very successful.
In conclusion, an undeniable dramatic, visual and musical success, magnified by a flawless cast and very concerned local forces.
Photo credits: © Karl Forster
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More details
Brussels. The Mint. 10-IX-2023. Bernard Foccroule (born in 1953): Cassandra, opera in a prologue and thirteen scenes, with an original libretto by Matthew Jocelyn. Direction and videos: Marie-Ève Signeyrole. Decor: Fabien Teigné. Costumes: Yashi. Lighting: Philippe Berthomé. With: Katarina Baradic, Cassandra; Jessica Niles, Sandra; Susan Bickley, Hecuba/Victoria; Sarah Defrise, Naomi; Paul Appleby, Blake; Joshua Hopkins, Appolo and an angry audience member; Gidon Saks, Priam/Alexander; Sandrine Mairesse, Stage Manager/Marjorie; Lisa Willems, the conference presenter. Choir of the Opéra de la Monnaie (conductor: Emmanuel Trenque). La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra, conductor: Kasushi Ono
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