This film by François-René Martin & Gordon combines breathtakingly beautiful images with the magnificent sound of the Orchestre de Paris. It creates a new Symphony representing the four Classical Elements: Fire (Stravinsky’s “Firebird”), Earth (Adoration of the Earth in Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”), Water (Debussy’s “La Mer”), Air (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea in “La Mer”). As a fifth element it adds Olivier Messiaen’s “L’Appel interstellaire” (Interstellar call) from “Des Canyons aux Étoiles” (From the canyons to the stars). The word Quintessence was originally the Latin expression for the fifth element (quinta essentia, literally “fifth being”). According to Aristoteles, there was aether as massless, unchangeable, eternal substance beyond the lunar sphere. This “fifth element” thus had completely different properties than the earthly ones. Filmed inside and outside the stunning Philharmonie de Paris in true Hollywood style this is a new milestone in the creative visualization of music. A fascinating feast for the eyes and ears.
Raphaël Pichon conducts Handel & Bach
Bach and Handel, opera and oratorio, and extreme affects such as frenzy and deep suffering – Raphaël Pichon and his Ensemble Pygmalion at the Philharmonie de Paris. The phenomenal French coloratura soprano Sabine Devieilhe makes the colorful program shine as a vivid Baroque panorama. PROGRAM Handel: Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno: “Un pensiero nemico di pace”, Giulio Cesare in Egitto: “Che sento? O dio!…Se pietà”; Bach: Cantatas: Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal, BWV 146: Sinfonia, Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut, BWV 199, “Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe”, BWV 156: Sinfonia, “Geist und Seele wird verwirret”, BWV 35: Concerto, “Ich habe genug”, BWV 82 (excerpts)
Christophe Rousset conducts Rameau
“Under the baton of Christophe Rousset, everything is perfectly executed, weighed, clean, the gestures are soft, everything is bathed in a precise but gentle delicacy” (forumopera.com) A true spearhead of French music, Jean-Philippe Rameau has always accompanied the Talens Lyriques and has quickly become an emblematic figure in their history. This is why they wanted to celebrate their 30th anniversary at the Châtelet with a programme dedicated to him. And what better work to do so than Les Fêtes d’Hébé ou Les Talens Lyriques? With Ambroisine Bré, Cyrille Dubois and Florian Sempey, they perform large excerpts from this opera-ballet composed in 1739 as well as from the lyrical tragedy Dardanus. PROGRAM Rameau: Les Fêtes d’Hébé ou Les Talens Lyriques? (extracts), Dardanus (extracts)
Gardiner conducts Berlioz and Elgar
The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France joins forces with conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and violist Antoine Tamestit for a concert featuring Italy and putting two composers in the spotlight: Hector Berlioz and Edward Elgar. With Harolde en Italie, Hector Berlioz invokes transalpine landscapes. Shaped by the period when the composer was resident at the Villa Medici, this symphony in four parts gives pride of place to the viola, played here by Antoine Tamestit – “one of the two or three greatest current performers” (Diapason). In the South (Alassio), composed between 1903 and 1904 by Edward Elgar, is still about Italy, pastoral atmosphere and Byronic colours. Brilliantly complex, this work, written in record time, is one of the peaks of romantic music. Let us travel a little deeper into Edward Elgar’s melancholy with his Sospiri. This adagio for strings composed at the dawn of the First World War is captivating in its romanticism and passion.
Innocence
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (*1952) draws listeners into her soundscape: From the brooding darkness of the opening bars, the audience finds itself dragged into the unfolding nightmare. The libretto by Sofi Oksanen interweaves two narratives of a school shooting. One focuses on the students and their teacher who were present at the time of the massacre. The second is set in the present day at a wedding with the family of the shooter celebrating their innocent son’s marriage. A thriller-like intensity shifts time levels and a mixture of nine languages. “The most powerful work Saariaho has written in a career now in its fifth decade” (The New York Times). Director Simon Stone approaches this multi-layered subject with sensitivity and empathy, supported by Susanna Malkki’s fine reading of the score on the rostrum of the London Symphony Orchestra and a great cast including Magdalena Kožena and Sandrine Piau. “A composer creates her masterpiece with Innocence” The New York Times
Zéphyr
Dance against the wind: French choreographer Mourad Merzouki sails towards a new adventure in the direction of the “Everest of the seas” – the sailing race Vendée Globe. After Vertikal, which propelled hip-hop into the air, Merzouki continues to exalt this dance in a play with natural forces: from weightlessness to the breath of the wind, from vertical to horizontal, he performs a 90-degree rotation and imagines a new poetics of space in which a gentle wind of lightness blows from the west: the Zephyrus. César Award winner Armand Amar (“Le Concert”) wrote the music. “A great fresco on life […] And the magic works.” Le Figaro