For his new opera season, intendant Peter de Caluwe searched for productions that could illustrate a balance between the divine power of fate and the human capacity to resist it. Can man write his own story or "There will be fate?" Under that title he places his opera season 2023-2024. He wants to make a plea for what he calls "possibilism." And that season begins with Das Rheingold from Wagner's Tetralogy. The program book is steeped in the red of fate, next time it will be blue, the color of hope. And de Caluwe believes in that especially. So much so that he asked the new miracle cure of modern technology, ChatGPT, to define that Tetralogy. He read the answer and it sounded perfect. Even though the question remains who actually came up with or created that definition, AI technology or man.
A welcome challenge for Romeo Castellucci (who else!) to direct that opera series over two seasons. Why him? "Because at De Munt everything is possible, it is the only place where I really feel at home to dare something, risks and mistakes included. I want to follow Wagner in his mythology but also open it up, both in themes and characters and not lock them up in any ideology." The music drama Das Rheingold can already be seen in October 2023.
But De Munt starts its new season with another good acquaintance of the theater, with Bernard Foccroulle. During lockdown covid times, he began writing Cassandra at the commission of De Munt. A new opera on a burning contemporary theme with nevertheless a figure from ancient Greek mythology. About that priestess whose predictions no one believed. Her counterpart is a young climate scientist and activist Sandra. "There are also now people who say wise things but are not heard." says Foccroulle. In the cast also the young Sarah Defrise who in 2022 was still named "Young Musician of the Year."
Also in the next season again a kind of remix, a "best of" from the early work of Giuseppi Verdi. It is a very special selection from a number of operas that Verdi wrote at a furious pace in his young years, when he was also plagued by many setbacks. And it becomes two separate and perhaps also exceptional evenings under the title Nostalgia and Rivoluzione, under the direction of Krystian Lada, for years also dramaturg at De Munt. Verdi was once a revolutionary and stood on the barricades for the unification of Italy. Peter de Caluwe: "In our youth we want to achieve ideals and change things. And as we get older we want to preserve the things we fought for. Is that then conservatism?" That new Verdi story revolves around friends who remember May '68 and later nostalgically look back on their revolutionary years. Two key moments in their life history, performed by two generations of singers.
In 2024 it will be a hundred years since Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels. De Munt pulls out all the stops with his last opera Turandot. But it will not be a traditional reading of that popular opera. "Should we blindly follow what tradition says?" intendant Peter De Caluwe asks himself "I plead decidedly for the opposite". We'll have to wait and see what director Christoph Coppens and conductor Kazushi Ono make of it together, certainly not with the classical ending, we hear, but fortunately with "Nessun dorma."
There is also a revival of that successful and magical "The Tale of Tsar Saltan" on the new program and also Benjamin Britten's "The Turn of the Screw" directed by Andrea Breth, which was only viewable online in 2021. One to dream away to, the other a nightmare.
We live in times of migration flows. An appropriate moment to bring an opera project based on a true story of Ali, a Somali refugee who arrives in Brussels via Tunisia and Malta. Director Ricard Soler Mallol, known for his intercultural and interdisciplinary approach, and multimedia artist Grey Filastine provide that world premiere.
Furthermore, Munt conductor Alain Altinoglu presented the symphonic season with among others Mahler 2 (Auferstehung) and 6 (Tragic), concerts around the Ring des Nibelungen but also Arnold Schönberg, works by film composers Erich Korngold and John Williams, a kids concert with Peter and the Wolf and not to forget there are 18 dance productions, with new work by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Die Kunst der Fuge, in the Sint Michiel en Goedele cathedral. The Concertini series with chamber music continues and a new series is added, Vocalissimo with great names like Magdalena Kozena, Cecilia Bartoli, Matthias Goerne…
We saw a happy intendant who said that De Munt is doing well, "….season closed positively, fragile, that is true but we remain a healthy organization with an audience and staff that keeps rejuvenating." And yes, he added one last ChatGPT produced quote to that: "The arts have the ability to inspire and move us in a way that cannot be explained."