The brilliant Patricia Petibon and her partner Cyrille Dubois take us on a journey to the heart of the Second Empire in this programme based on the art of Offenbach. All we have to do is let ourselves be carried away by the prodigious wit, elegant humour and dramatic instinct of the man whom Wagner once described, not without genuine respect, as the "Mozart of the Champs-Élysées".
As a master of the Bouffes Parisiennes and the Opéra-Comique, as a virtuoso cellist who was accompanied on the piano by Liszt, the tireless Offenbach put his astonishing musical prodigality at the service of "Parisian life" and its hedonism. The overture to Orpheus in the Underworld, in Carl Binder's revised vision, is full of ironic and striking discoveries, including the illustrious "Cancan" and the irresistible crescendo towards the concluding gallop. Rarer, but no less exhilarating, are the overtures to two later works, Madame Favart (1878) and La Fille du tambour-major (1879), which evoke respectively the romantic life of the actress Justine Favart and Bonaparte's campaign in Italy, a few days before the battle of Marengo. But Offenbach's art also includes arias and duets, irresistible gems of dramatic sense and sparkling parody: a splendid scene of theatrical voice, from which, however, emotion is not absent. Who has not fallen under the spell of the famous "Barcarolle" from Les Contes d'Hoffmann or dreamt, "for the time of a song", of Venetian nights of love?
Types
- Music
- Music
- Lyric art
- Classical music
- Concert
Date
08/01/2023