La Monnaie Presents Its 2019/20 Season

This first season of Peter de Caluwe's third mandate in Brussels is, in a certain sense, also a blueprint for the coming years, during which the usual seasonal themes will step aside for a new 'seasonal architecture', allowing an even stronger focus on creation and experimentation. In total, the audience of La Monnaie can look forward to a record number of eleven operas in 2019-20.

Each season will be launched with a double world premiere, presenting in parallel two La Monnaie commissions: an opera by one of the leading composers of the day and an opera debut by an emerging talent.

Macbeth Underworld is the third La Monnaie commission for the French composer Pascal Dusapin. A nightmarish opera full of sound and fury in which, rather than Macbeth the man of power, Macbeth the mystery will emerge from the shadows. Fortunately, the two guides in this macabre realm of spirits are reliable: Music Director Alain Altinoglu and the French Shakespeare prodigy Thomas Jolly. Georg Nigl and Magdalena Ko en take on the roles of the diabolical couple.

For Le Silence des ombres, the figurehead of the new generation of French composers, Benjamin Attahir, will set Maurice Maeterlinck's Trois petits drames pour marionettes to music. Together with writer-director Oliver Lexa, and a cast of young musicians and singers (in collaboration with the European Network of Opera Academies), he will conjure a world in which a lot remains unsaid and unseen, but not unsung for all that.

A second pillar of this architecture: the Herculean opera project at the start of spring, when a number of related pieces will be combined into a single project following a unifing dramaturgy. The Trilogia Mozart Da Ponte is therefore more than just the sum of Le nozze di Figaro, Cos fan tutte and Don Giovanni. The three masterpieces will all be set in one and the same place and on one and the same day: the apartment building around the corner, one of the folli giornate that turns our lives upside down. Antonello Manacorda and Ben Glassberg will conduct every single note of Mozart's scores, and in the minutely elaborated dramaturgy of Clarac-Deloeuil > le lab each opera can be enjoyed independently. But only in interaction with one another will they give away all their secrets.

Beyond these two centres of gravity, the rest of this season's opera programme
offers three classics and three (re)discoveries. To begin with, there will be the autumn diptych around Jeanne d'Arc.

Giovanna d'Arco is one of the few Verdi opera's that are still waiting for their La Monnaie premiere. Giuliano Carella will conduct this all too rarely performed work in concert version with soprano Salome Jicia in the combative lead role.

A lot more fragile and spiritual is the virgin in Jeanne d'Arc au b cher. This 'myst re lyrique' by Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel, who, as a fervent Catholic, is supposed to have abandoned his initial doubts about this project after a vision he had on a train journey to Brussels, will be presented in the acclaimed production of Romeo Castellucci and former Music Director Kazushi Ono.

In the last years of his life, Jacques Offenbach gave his all to be included in the pantheon of 'true opera composers' with Les Contes d'Hoffmann, a highly imaginative and disquieting portrait of the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. Patricia Petibon and Nicole Chevalier perform alternately the four soprano parts. They will not only be an inspiring muse to the unfortunate Hoffmann Eric Cutler and Enea Scala, portrayed as a film-maker in distress but also to conductor Alain Altinoglu and director Krzysztof Warlikowki.

Today, Stanis aw Moniuszko, the 'father of Polish opera', is still insufficiently known, certainly in the West, but 2019, the year of his bicentenary, might bring some change to this situation. La Monnaie is in any case turning a spotlight on him with Moniuszko Paris, a new chamber opera by Andrzej Kwieci ski. A production in collaboration with Teatr Wielki Warschau and the young talents of ENOA.

The two last operas of the season will centre around dreams, longing and illusion. With Herman, the lead character in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, this soon deteriorates into an obsessive compulsion, which conductor Nathalie Stutzmann will try to extract from each note of this feverish score. In Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, by contrast, even the most bitter moments in the Marschallin's farewell to her love dream are given a sweet little edge, and Alain Altinoglu can waltz his orchestra through some of the most elegant pages of twentieth-century music. Both operas will be regally served by the in-depth Personenregie of, respectively, David Marton and Damiano Michieletto, and have promising role debuts in store: Anne Sofie Von Otter as the Countess, Sally Matthews as the Marschallin and Mich le Losier in the role of Octavian.

In our concert programme, Alain Altinoglu will conduct his personal best-of of Strauss and Tchaikovsky, alongside, among others, an all-American New Year's programme and contemporary compositions.

Our symphonic collaboration with our federal partners BOZAR and the Belgian National Orchestra continues with a new edition of United Music of Brussels, a joint closing concert with Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and a strong focus on composer Pascal Dusapin.

Furthermore, seven lied evenings (including a new staged production) will offer our audience as many international lied experts who will immerse themselves in the sung poetry of famous and forgotten composers.

Finally, the recently presented new collaboration with the Th tre National Wallonie-Bruxelles and KVS results in a joint dance programme for Brussels: Troika Dance. For its part, La Monnaie, in collaboration with the Kaaitheater, will continue to present the repertoire of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and also welcome Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui as well as the latest creation of Sasha Waltz.

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