Pelleas et Melisande

Composer: Debussy, Claude

Librettist/Text Author: Maeterlinck, Maurice

Conductor: Pascal, Maxime

Orchestra: Malmo Opera Orchestra

Chorus: Malmo Opera Chorus

Chorus Master: Kellinghaus, Andre

Arkel: Bronk, Stephen

Berger: Olcese, Stefano

Genevieve: Lyren, Emma

Golaud: Alvaro, Laurent

Medecin: Olcese, Stefano

Melisande: Daviet, Jenny

Pelleas: Mauillon, Marc

Yniold: Mathevet, Julie

Set Designer: Caron, Adeline

Costume Designer: Blanchot, Alain

Lighting Designer: Iger, Mael

Stage Director: Lazar, Benjamin

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Date of Production: 11-2017

Venue: Malmo Opera

Playing Time: 02:54:36

Catalogue Number: BAC144

UPC: 3760115301443

Libretto

Pelleas et Melisande EN

Synopsis

Pelleas et Melisande

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When Debussy completes the score, based on the eponymous symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, of Pelleas et Melisande in 1902, the world of opera still abides by Richard Wagner and the upheaval he caused with Tristan und Isolde. But Debussy decides to stand on the exact opposite side, and uses his new opus to preach a new aesthetic creed. In depicting the forbidden love story between the timid Pelleas and the beautiful Melisande, kept apart by an unfortunate marriage, the French composer brings us back to the immortal legend of Tristan and Isolde, but this time showing the world that the future of music could very well lie far away from Wagner's overwhelming lyricism and outsized rhetoric.

This new production, created by one of the rising stars of French stage direction Benjamin Lazar for the Malmo Opera (headed by Ingmar Bergman from 1952 to 1958), encapsulates all the different aspects of this mysterious work, from the oniric poetry invented by Maeterlinck and Debussy to the realism, poignant because openly simple and even mundane, of these profoundly human beings lost in a forest full of sound and symbols that will never let them escape.

The young French conductor Maxime Pascal, the Orchestra of the Malmo Opera, and an almost all-French cast (among which the excellent Marc Mauillon and Jenny Daviet), bring forth with intelligence all the refinement and all the vitality this unique and fascinating score has to offer.