Requiem

Joseph Swensen, conductor | Stéphane Braunschweig, director and set designer Catherine Trottmann, soprano | Fleur Barron, mezzo-soprano | Stanislas de Barbeyrac, tenor | Adrien Mathonat, bass | Thibault Vancraenenbroeck, costumes | Marion Hewlett, lighting Georges Gagneré, assistant director Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine Chœur de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux | Salvatore Caputo, chorus master

If Mozart's music possesses the rare power to live in the time of eternity, it also has the power to speak to our present. Mozart's legendary work, the source of all fantasies and all admiration, finds in Stéphane Braunschweig's production, created within the framework of the "zero purchase" initiative launched by the Opéra National de Bordeaux, an extension and an amplification. The dramatic power of the music meets a human catastrophe in which the mass of the chorus and the soloists unite, in a surge of resilience, to resist the planned obsolescence of life.

For in Mozart's Requiem, in its Kyrie eleison ("Lord, have mercy") chanted by an agitated crowd, in the relentless blows of the Rex Tremendae ("O King of awesome majesty"), right through to the final fugue that sweeps the stage into a furious whirlwind, there lies a message, barely veiled: here, one does not pray for one's salvation. One demands it.

Production Opéra National de Bordeaux

Ateliers de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux, within the framework of its "zero purchase" initiative