Laura Claycomb Putting the color into coloratura

In the first half, Jean-François Sivadier was the referee in the ring where Le Concert D’Astrée and Ensemble Ictus will wage battle, the Ancients versus the Moderns: who is the most worthy for his art? You cannot forget the Past, the first contenders argue; you have no right to scorn the Present, the others retort – and the ensembles face off valiantly to the blows of masterpieces.

In the second half, with the premiere of a short opera by Helmut Oehring, ORFEO 2014, the two ensembles bury the hatchet and come together to serve a dream team of singers. The founding work from which the opera derives its plot, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, here will be mixed by the impertinent Berlin composer with an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – a dive into the colonial disaster that inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Straight to Hell, with this hallucinatory game that morphs between the Baroque and the contemporary.  Shows 18th and 19th of June, 2014