Requiem

Joseph Swensen, conductor | Stéphane Braunschweig, stage direction and set design 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, choirmaster If Mozart's music possesses the rare strength to merge with the time of eternity, it also has the power to speak to our present.

Mozart's legendary work, a source of all fantasies and admirations, finds an extension, an augmentation, in Stéphane Braunschweig's staging, created as part of the “zero purchase” initiative launched by the Opéra National de Bordeaux.

The dramatic power of the music meets a human catastrophe where choral mass and soloists unite, in a surge of resilience, to resist the programmed 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 dreadful King”), right up to the final fugue that sweeps the stage into a furious whirlwind, lies a barely veiled message: here, we do not pray for salvation.

We demand it. Production Opéra National de Bordeaux Ateliers de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux, as part of its “zero purchase” initiative