Francis Poulenc

The two parts of the evening showcase two opposite extremes of emotion. Firstly, Poulenc’s powerful La voix humaine (The Human Voice) tells the touching story of an abandoned woman. The opera monologue of approximately 45 minutes is performed in melodramatic film noir style. After the interval the atmosphere changes dramatically, turning into a raucous show of musical classics and popular repertoire. Directed by Jussi Nikkilä and conducted by Dalia Stasevska, this event has been put together specifically to showcase the great artistry of Karita Mattila.

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House presents a new production of Poulenc's short opera La Voix Humaine, featuring soprano Danielle de Niese and shot on location in Paris and London.

The Human Voice is a contemporary adaptation of the 1928 stage play by Jean Cocteau, and "La Voix Humaine," the 1958 chamber opera by Francis Poulenc. In a radically new production The Human Voice presents a flip of gender, and a metaphor of global pandemic. Now in English, Isaiah Bell sings to his male lover, and into the abyss of COVID. In a Zoom call impaired by lag and freeze and dropped signals, technology is once again enemy to intimacy. The agony of failed love is heightened by the necessity of distance, by the anaesthetic of the machine.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the classic John Dexter production of Poulenc’s devastating story of faith and martyrdom. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard sings the touching role of Blanche and soprano Karita Mattila, a legend in her own time, returns to the Met as the Prioress.

Running through Bartók’s disenchanted tale, whose haunting music was initially condemned as unplayable, and the expression of despair in Poulenc’s monologue, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski perceives a shared dramatic thread, a shared feminine consciousness and a shared sense of imprisonment and suffocation: for the woman who penetrates the confines of Bluebeard’s castle and Elle, the woman who clings to a telephone conversation with a man as the only thing worth living for, are condemned to share the same fate. And this man she speaks to, does he really exist? Unless the director has interpreted Cocteau’s words to the letter and the telephone has become a “terrifying weapon that leaves no trace, makes no noise”…

Performed at the Théâtre Graslin in Nantes in 2013. Francis Poulenc (1899-1963): Dialogues des Carmélites, opera in 3 acts and 12 scenes from a libretto by Emmet Lavery.

The first ever performances in Munich, this production was entrusted to Dmitri Tcherniakov, whose worldwide reputation is underpinned by productions like Eugene Onegin and Macbeth at the Paris Opera and Don Giovanni at Aix-en- Provence. The superb international cast includes a fine Blanche de la Force in Susan Gritton and an excellent Madame de Croissy by Sylvie Brunet, who was favourably compared to Rita Gorr in the press.

The first ever performances in Munich, this production was entrusted to Dmitri Tcherniakov, whose worldwide reputation is underpinned by productions like Eugene Onegin and Macbeth at the Paris Opera and Don Giovanni at Aix-en- Provence. The superb international cast includes a fine Blanche de la Force in Susan Gritton and an excellent Madame de Croissy by Sylvie Brunet, who was favourably compared to Rita Gorr in the press.

A man's bathroom routine triggers a miraculous vision in a nearby church.

An elegant young woman in her messy room answers the phone call from her lover. This one, who intends to leave her, tries to make her understand what he is up to without hurting her too much, hypersensitive as she is . All means are good: big words, cajolery, denial, lies. As for the woman, who senses that this is the end, she desperately tries to win him back, passing from tenderness to passion, from the threat of attempted suicide to calm, from regret to outbursts of violence.

The young hero seems the essence of maleness, yet he's troubled by vaguely feminine objects. Soon his masculine and feminine selves are intercut, as each of his identities appears to look and gesture at the other. The film, at once melancholy and transcendent, consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux through haunting, densely interlaced images.

Cattion d'Urville takes in a gypsy, Sarah, and her granddaughter Miarka, in an outbuilding of her chateau. Miarka, while growing up, attracts the attention of Luigi, Cattion's nephew who, little by little, falls in love with her. Sarah raised her daughter in the tradition of gypsies who curse anyone who marries a man who is not a gypsy. Miarka ends up loving Luigi and he wants to marry her. The law of race opposes it. Fortunately, a well-conducted genealogical investigation will discover that Luigi is of the gypsy race. They will marry.