Schedule of events - Opéra de Lille

The Songs of Bilitis inspired not only Claude Debussy, but also the Breton composer Rita Strohl. Brenda Poupard, heard last season in Bluebeard's Castle, places these songs alongside melodies by Augusta Holmès, herself both composer and poet. In their respective song cycles, Strohl and Holmès explore the many faces of desire: complicity, attachment, intoxication, but also obsession and sorrow, leading to the vertigo of disappearance. By giving unflinching expression to the violence that can arise within a relationship, as well as to the forms of resistance it provokes, they reveal how two beings may love each other passionately while also causing one another harm.

As a contemporary counterpoint, pianist and composer Kaoli Ono presents her Five Wakas. In this work, she sets to music the love poems of a 9th-century geisha who, within the miniature form of the waka, describes a night spent waiting for her lover.

Kaoli Ono

Five Wakas (2015)

Augusta Holmès

Excerpts from the cycles Les Sept Ivresses (1882)
and Les Heures (1900)

Pauline Viardot

Songs (second half of the 19th century)

Rita Strohl

Excerpts from Bilitis (1898)

Claude Debussy

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (1910)
Trois Chansons de Bilitis: “La Flûte de Pan” (1897–1898)

Performed by
Brenda Poupard, mezzo-soprano
Kaoli Ono, piano

For the soundtrack of the film A Clockwork Orange, Wendy Carlos transformed Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary into a futuristic sonic vision using synthesizers. This passage from one universe to another serves as the acoustic compass for La Tempête in this Insomniac concert. Time and again, the music moves between eras and imaginaries separated by centuries. Within this space liberated from chronology, connections emerge between the works, and at times the musical thought of one age is revealed through the sonic means of another.

Henry Purcell

Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary (1695)
Hear my prayer, O Lord (c. 1680)
O, I’m sick of life (c. 1680)

Philippe Hersant

Falling Star, for eight mixed voices and viola da gamba (2005)

John Taverner

Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas: Sanctus – Benedictus (c. 1520)

John Bull, John Blitheman, Christopher Tye, John Taverner

Variations on In nomine (16th century)

Arvo Pärt

The Deer’s Cry (2007)
Summa (1977)

Thomas Tallis

Miserere nostri, for seven voices (before 1575)

Duration: 1 hour

For the soundtrack of the film A Clockwork Orange, Wendy Carlos transformed Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary into a futuristic sonic vision using synthesizers. This passage from one universe to another serves as the acoustic compass for La Tempête in this Insomniac concert. Time and again, the music moves between eras and imaginaries separated by centuries. Within this space liberated from chronology, connections emerge between the works, and at times the musical thought of one age is revealed through the sonic means of another.

Steve Reich
Proverb (1995)
Piano Phase (1967),
version pour vibraphone
Pérotin
Viderunt omnes,
organum à quatre voix (vers 1200)
Anonyme, attribué à Pérotin
Deus misertus hominis (13e siècle)
Fredrik Zeller
PeroPop Sederunt (2003)
Giacinto Scelsi
Tre pezzi per sassofono soprano
o tenore : I & III (1956)
Morton Feldman
Chorus and Instruments II (1967)
Gavin Bryars
Extra Time (2018)
Toshio Hosokawa
Three Love Songs : « Firefly » (2006)
Per Nørgård
Morgen-meditation (2002)

Duration: 1 hour

For the soundtrack of the film A Clockwork Orange, Wendy Carlos transformed Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary into a futuristic sonic vision using synthesizers. This passage from one universe to another serves as the acoustic compass for La Tempête in this Insomniac concert. Time and again, the music moves between eras and imaginaries separated by centuries. Within this space liberated from chronology, connections emerge between the works, and at times the musical thought of one age is revealed through the sonic means of another.

Long before daybreak, DJs Arandel and Camille Rhonat will explore, in the third chapter of this nocturnal journey, the musical thought of early music through synthetic sound worlds — much in the spirit of Wendy Carlos. Their concert pays tribute to this openly transgender composer, a pioneer of electronic music, and to her experiments with the Moog synthesizer.

Tribute to Wendy Carlos

by DJs Arandel and Camille Rhonat

Duration: 1 hour

Claude Debussy and Karol Szymanowski composed, only a few years apart, two masterpieces of instrumental music inspired by Greek mythology. Yet their musical worlds are far removed from one another: Szymanowski, a Polish composer born in what is now Ukraine, still belongs to the great Romantic tradition of virtuosity, while Debussy tirelessly sought a music of suggestion, timbre, and ambiguity — that music “between the notes.”

Claude Debussy

Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune” (1894),
transcription for piano by Jean-Michel Dayez
Six Épigraphes antiques,
for piano four hands (1914–15)

Karol Szymanowski

Myths, Op. 30, for violin and piano (1915)

Performed by
Wibert Aerts, violin
Jean-Michel Dayez, piano
Thibaut Pruvot, piano

Sampling existing musical material and placing it in new contexts is a common practice in pop and electronic music. But this process is also one of the familiar tools of contemprary composition. Born in 1986, Laure M. Hiendl develops his own form of musical hacking, sometimes going so far as to “recycle” ideas that the history of music seemed to have consigned to the attic or the cellar. He draws on scores from the past, now accessible within vast digital archives that constitute a sort of collective memory, and extracts fragments from them. Not to quote them, but to construct new soundscapes, like so many sentimental landscapes from another era.

In Chronochromatic Variations III, Hiendl composes using melodic fragments from a string trio by the Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950), who is relatively little known today. He isolates them, breaks them down and repeats them in a loop. The seemingly endless repetition of Moeran’s tonal sounds and motifs, marked by the influence of English folk music, gives the impression that time stands still. At the same time, each of the composition’s four movements evokes the melancholy of a vague memory: something very familiar that suddenly seems distant and irretrievably lost.

He is a beatboxer: using his mouth and voice, he produces rhythms, percussion and sound effets, just like a real musician. She is a singer, drawing inspiration from neo-soul and jazz. From their collaboration emerges a musical experience in which rhythm and voice interplay in a breathtaking performance. For this Sieste concert, Mystraw and Coline Dangre explore the sounds of hip hop through an original creation, where improvisation opens up new possibilities.

This concert is presented by Art-Track as part of the closing week of the Hip Hop Games, with the Opera hosting the100% impro international final on Sunday 13 December.

More than four centuries stand between the emergence of the first violas da gamba and that of the electric guitar. The gap is somewhat narrower between Marin Marais, composer and violist at the court of Louis XIV, and Burkhard Stagl, an Austrian guitarist, composer and improviser of experimental music born in 1960. Stangl has responded to Marais with subtle musical commentaries on his own instrument, driven by the conviction that, had Marais known the elctric guitar, he would probably have embraced its musical possibilities.

The viola da gamba player Eva Reiter and the guitarist Tom Pauwels — two pillars of the Ictus ensemble — bring together works by Marais and the contemporary echoes they have inspired in Stangl. Performing Marais’ works on bothe the viola da gamba and the elctric guitar, they draw a bridge between two distant points on the timeline of music history. Or perhaps they view this timeline as a vast soundscape, where different eras become simultaneously accessible to our contemporary ears. Our conception of time moving in a single direction begins to waver: pathways open up between eras, allowing them to engage in a two-way dialogue. It is a though Stangl were not merely responding to Marais, but that Marais had sent a sonic message into the future, intended for Stangl and today’s listeners.

A paradox that is only on the surface, much like the title of this concert, taken from an opera by Marais, written for Versailles but now lost. In this dramatic idyll to which Reiter au Pauwels, Marais and Stangl invite us, the distinction between what belongs to the past, the present of the future eventually dissolves. Until time itself stands still.

Alexandre Scriabine aspirait à des expériences extatiques capables de conduire interprètes et auditeurs au-delà de notre monde. Son Mystère, projet d’art total dans l’Himalaya, devait transcender la planète et l’humanité dans un acte de destruction créatrice, mais ne vit jamais le jour. Vers la flamme accomplit cette destruction en miniature, à travers l’évocation d’un feu incessant, symbole à la fois créateur et destructeur. Un même élan vers l’extase traverse sa Sonate pour piano n^o 5. Catholique fervent, Messiaen puisait dans les rites d’autres cultures des conceptions spirituelles à portée presque universelle. Dans sa virtuose Île de feu, il s’inspire ainsi des rituels magiques du feu en Papouasie–Nouvelle-Guinée. Influencé à son tour par l’astrologie et le mysticisme, le compositeur américain George Crumb explorait les liens entre sons et significations métaphoriques. Ses fantaisies pour piano tirées de Makrokosmos I et II font notamment référence à la symbolique des constellations, tandis que l’amplification et les techniques de jeu expérimentales révèlent des couleurs sonores entièrement nouvelles.

Pièces de Olivier Messiaen, Alexandre Scriabine, Brecht Valckenaers, George Crumb

Brecht Valckenaers piano

Durée : 1h

Concert allongé dans le grand foyer
En écho à l’imaginaire déployé par Jennifer Walshe dans son opéra Mars, ActeSix et son directeur artistique Samuel Hengebaert ont conçu pour cet Insomniaque trois orbites autour de la planète rouge.

La nuit commence par une contemplation musicale de la voûte céleste — et rien de mieux, pour cela, que de s’allonger. Si le concert avait lieu en plein air, on pourrait apercevoir au-dessus de Lille le Bélier et les Gémeaux. Le compositeur Karlheinz Stockhausen a brossé le portrait des douze signes du zodiaque dans son cycle Tierkreis. Ces douze pièces de caractère forment la colonne vertébrale du premier concert. Conçues à l’origine pour des boîtes à musique, elles peuvent être jouées ad libitum par différents instruments. Entre les constellations, ActeSix fait surgir, tels des météorites, des fragments de musique venus de différentes époques, de Biber à Penderecki et Sofia Goubaïdoulina. Comme autant de réponses humaines à notre fascination pour le ciel.

Karlheinz Stockhausen Tierkreis (1974-75),
entrelacé de douze répons anciens, modernes et contemporains de Heinrich Biber (1644-1704), Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) et Sofia Goubaïdoulina (1931-2025), entre autres

Avec le collectif ActeSix
Lucile Richardot mezzo-soprano

Durée : 1h

Concert allongé dans le grand foyer

En écho à l’imaginaire déployé par Jennifer Walshe dans son opéra Mars, ActeSix et son directeur artistique Samuel Hengebaert ont conçu pour cet Insomniaque trois orbites autour de la planète rouge.

Dans le deuxième concert de la soirée, ActeSix pose cette question : que resterait-il de nos musiques si nous devions quitter la Terre ? Autour des Folk Songs de Luciano Berio et de la figure de Cathy Berberian, l’ensemble imagine une sorte de capsule musicale : langues, mélodies, danses et traditions transmises d’une génération à l’autre, transformées par le voyage et la mémoire.

Luciano Berio Folk Songs (extraits, 1964), et des chants, danses et musiques populaires de la Renaissance et du 17^e siècle

Avec le collectif ActeSix
Lucile Richardot mezzo-soprano
Hélène Desaint alto
Alexis Derouin violoncelle
Corentin Garac flûte
Josèphe Cottet violon baroque
Julie Dessaint viole de gambe
Eloy Orzaiz orgue positif
Clara Izambert-Jarry harpe

Durée : 1h

Concert allongé dans le grand foyer

En écho à l’imaginaire déployé par Jennifer Walshe dans son opéra Mars, ActeSix et son directeur artistique Samuel Hengebaert ont conçu pour cet Insomniaque trois orbites autour de la planète rouge.

Le troisième concert de la soirée explore notre perception du temps jusqu’à son dérèglement, à travers des musiques répétitives allant des premiers ostinatos baroques aux œuvres de Philip Glass et Julius Eastman. Aux pulsations sonores acoustiques viennent se mêler des loops électroniques. Cette attention renouvelée à l’écoute est placée sous le signe de Pauline Oliveros, pionnière de la musique électronique, dont la pratique du Deep Listening nous invite à ne plus seulement regarder l’espace, mais à tenter de l’écouter.

Musiques répétitives anciennes et contemporaines, acoustiques et électroniques :
œuvres et fragments de Philip Glass (né en 1937), Julius Eastman (1940-1990) et Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016)

Avec le collectif ActeSix
Lucile Richardot mezzo-soprano
Hélène Desaint alto
Alexis Derouin violoncelle
Corentin Garac flûte
Josèphe Cottet violon baroque
Julie Dessaint viole de gambe
Eloy Orzaiz orgue positif
Clara Izambert-Jarry harpe

Durée : 1h