“A Midsummer Night's Dream” by Benjamin Britten, a comic opera composed in 1960, is on the menu for the Lausanne Opera festivals. A work enhanced by the poetic and daring staging of Laurent Pelly and the musical direction of Guillaume Tourniaire, to be enjoyed until December 31.
A summer night in an enchanted forest, mischievous fairies, upset loves and a troop of artisans in search of theatrical glory: this is “A Midsummer Night's Dream”, an opera by Benjamin Britten inspired from William Shakespeare's timeless masterpiece. The work is on view at the Lausanne Opera until December 31, 2024, in a production by Frenchman Laurent Pelly.
“A Midsummer Night's Dream” is one of Britten's most fascinating operas. With his light and subtle musical writing, Britten manages to capture the very spirit of Shakespeare's work. Each group of characters has its own musical identity. Fairies and elves are ethereal, almost unreal. Human lovers are passionate and impulsive, burlesque artisans truly comical. The score, rich and delicate, offers a real challenge for the performers.
Theater and music united for the best
For conductor Guillaume Tourniaire, who directs the Lausanne production, Britten's work constitutes the absolute genius of theater and music. “It's an absolutely remarkable combination (…) With Shakespeare in the text, it's completely unique in the history of music. There are very few moments of theater of this level in the original language, with such extraordinary music,” he told l’Echo des pavanes on December 21.
When he approached the piece for the first time, the conductor first tried “to find [s]we walk through this forest, through this night and through this maze of madness. The music is extremely complex and it follows this madness by illustrating it in a brilliant way.”
A magical and labyrinthine atmosphere
In the forest of “A Midsummer Night's Dream”, nothing goes as planned. But beyond the story, it is the magical and labyrinthine atmosphere of the forest that fascinates, wonderfully rendered by the direction of Laurent Pelly. Through a play of small suspended lights, mirrors at the back of the stage, moving moons with changing colors, the theater man captivates by offering a spectacle of absolute beauty.
“The challenge with this work is to be able to mix all the universes. In “A Midsummer Night's Dream”, there are three: that of young lovers, the magical universe [des roi et reine des elfes] Tytania and Oberon, and finally the world of artisans, who rehearse a show. (…) What brings it all together is the night, the mystery of the summer night. And in the show, it is the magic of the image that will bring everything together. I love losing the viewer in an image. We don't really know where reality is, where the bottom of the stage is, where the characters stop,” explains Laurent Pelly in l'Echo des pavanes.
It is the energy, the madness of the characters, the dramatic tension which, pushed to the extreme in this play, can result in something very funny and very dynamic.
For the director, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has a particular form, of great modernity. “We are in a crazy play, truly, with a lot of dramaturgical audacity, but also a lot of poetic ideas, and which could have been written yesterday. (…) The feeling of love and the magic of the characters are universal and pass the barrier of time without any problem This work is a wonderful playground for a director”, concludes Laurent Pelly.
Comments collected by Sydney Fierro
Adaptation web: Melissa Härtel
“A Midsummer Night's Dream” by Benjamin Britten, directed by Laurent Pelly, with Christopher Lowrey, Marie-Eve Munger, Michael Porter, Heather Lowe, James Newby, Aoife Miskelly, Faith Prendergast, David Ireland, the Master's degree in Opera from the Lausanne Conservatory, the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra conducted by Guillaume Tourniaire, Lausanne Opera, to be seen again on the 27th, December 29 and 31, 2024.
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