MANON LESCAUT in Baden Baden

Festspielhouse Baden Baden Presents:

Puccini: MANON LESCAUT

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra & Sir Simon Rattle

  • Sat., 12. April 2014, 18:00 o’clock
  • Wed., 16. April 2014, 18:00 o’clock
  • Mon., 21. April 2014, 18:00 o’clock
 lescautbadenEva-Maria Westbroek © pr

A rococo beauty who ultimately drags everything into the abyss, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is never fully satisfied. She becomes addicted to the admiring glances she receives from others, and the luxury and diamonds in which she bathes don’t warm her for long. In this, his first successful opera, the composer paints a portrait of a woman who has everything, only to lose it because she is incapable of holding on to anything. Likewise Puccini, who identified closely with his heroine, helping himself to many things. He took the orchestra from Verdi, expanding it with phrases and themes he found in Wagner and the French people. To all of this he added something from within himself – a melody more breathless than that of Verdi, but in many ways, sweeter. Add to that an ingenious fire in which ideas flow and the themes are inspired. The fact that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra turn to Puccini – this beloved yet ostracized composer – is symbolic. Here is someone who was thought to be outmoded for a long time, but there is really so much more to be discovered about him and his work. The tale of one who becomes a model but remains a girl, is very contemporary.

In Italian with German and English surtitles.CAST AND ARTISTIC TEAM:

Sir Simon Rattle Musical direction
Richard Eyre Direction
Robert Howell Stage

Fotini Dimou Costume Design

Peter Mumford Light Design

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Philharmonia Choir Vienna

Eva-Maria Westbroek Manon Lescaut
Lester Lynch Lescaut, her brother
Massimo Giordano Renato Des Grieux
Liang Li Geronte de Ravoir
Bogdan Mihai Edmondo
Magdalena Kožená Singer

Giacomo Puccini
Manon Lescaut – Opera in four acts

A coproduction between the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden and the Metropolitan Opera New York.

 
This entry was posted in Music, OPera and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.