PALAIS DE LA MONNAIE

‘The curtain of our eyelids opens: where is the stage: outside or inside?’ The prologue to Bluebeard’s Castle invites us to see the work as ...

Remote Opera is a performance that involves 50 visitor-walkers interacting with the places are taken to. Each group experiences its own show, thanks to this ...

In 1983, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker made her international breakthrough with Rosas danst Rosas, a performance that has since become a benchmark in the history ...

‘At the piano, Johannes Brahms introduced us to marvellous lands, and made us travel with him to the world of the Ideal. His playing, marked ...

“Amneris: I love him too… I, the Pharaoh’s daughter, am your rival. / Aida: My rival! So be it – for we are of equal ...

‘My time will come,’ Gustav Mahler once prophesied. Alain Platel has drawn inspiration from the cultural study Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914 by ...

Our dance programme would not be complete without a project by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. This Belgian dancer and choreographer has been a member of the ...

‘Music is a labyrinth one can enter and leave over and over again, always discovering new directions, yet one can never fathom its mystery.’ Pierre ...

‘If I am not moved, if the libretto does not touch my heart...then it’s not for me.’ Puccini knew what he was looking for in ...

‘Bartók found a point upon which the heritage of the past and the revolution of the present – in Adorno’s words, restoration and progress – ...

‘Yuya and Matsukaze are like a bowl of rice,’ as the Japanese saying goes, which suggests that you are no more likely to tire of ...

‘I now realise that innocence and a good heart are far more precious to the soul than false glory.’ ‘La Clemenza di Silla’? In Mozart’s ...

‘I am there to be beautiful. I have a purpose in life, which is to be loved.’ The words of the sulphurous Duchess in Powder ...

‘Dance is an art form in which we are the instruments. To dance is to dream with our legs!’ rhapsodises Mozart’s wife, Constanze. The young ...

‘Every departure longingly awaits a return, / Only you have missed the day of your return.’ Thus Penelope describes her wait for the return of ...

‘There is so much emotional fire in this work. So much fire that if we both caught fire, we would be reduced to ashes.’ In ...

“Improvisation is composition in the immediacy of the moment” reflects Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In the instrumental suite A Love Supreme, one of the highlights ...

‘Vague and precise, mysterious and clear like a child’s look, absent and present like a summer night...’ With the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, we could ...

‘Music begins where the possibilities of language end,’ said Jean Sibelius, and Edvard Grieg agreed: ‘Words sometimes need music, but music needs nothing.’ Each of ...

‘In reality, this Lohengrin is an utterly new phenomenon for the modern consciousness!’ Richard Wagner himself understood the innovative nature of this, his sixth work ...

‘Singing pleases my soul. Dance, for me, is almost as sweet as a kiss. Let your steps be slow, let them imitate the attitudes of ...

‘He has tones for the subtlest feelings, thoughts, and even occurences and circum- stances.’ So said Robert Schumann of Schubert’s songs, and among his six ...

‘All our journeys, all our efforts will lead us to this point: the fence, which lets no one pass without making them bleed.’ A modern ...

‘Art, and above all music, serves to lift us up to the highest point possible above that which is.’ Gabriel Fauré’s aesthetic credo underlay his ...

‘This symphony is the creation of a giant and in spiritual range, wealth of ideas and magnificence it surpasses all of the master’s other symphonies’ ...

‘A beautiful song – a shame that it shows such disrespect to the Mayor!’ This remark from the score of The Golden Cockerel highlights the ...

What happens when the rhythms and imagery of Shakespeare’s words become movement and are transformed into dance? How can listening to a mute partner be ...

‘I was born very young into a very old world.’ This sharp yet melancholy ‘sigh’ from the composer Erik Satie underlay much of his work, ...

‘It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But that ...

‘An opera is an absurd thing. Orders are given in song; politics is discussed in a duet. One danses around a grave, and dagger thrusts ...

‘The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything’ (Philip Glass). The mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter excels in the great ...

‘When it storms upon the waves / The shipman’s wife knits at home, / But her heart is yearning / Out to the wild sea.’ ...

‘A symphony is not a joke!’ For Johannes Brahms, composing a symphony was utterly serious and also a weighty task in which he constantly felt ...

‘The experience of creating and performing Rain is ‘unconditioning’: it requires yielding to a sense of generous anarchy within a rigorously constructed mathematical framework,’ the ...

‘This tragedy is one of mankind’s greatest creations!’ Shakespeare’s Macbeth stimulated Verdi’s musical development towards music theatre with solid dramaturgical foundations: as a result of ...

Whether it be Rameau or Poulenc, the French soprano Annick Massis knows the French repertoire through and through, but has a pronounced penchant for the ...

’How good it is to rest a while under a tree when the sun is hot and sultry.’ These words, the first in the libretto, ...

Sweeney Todd (1979) is a contemporary work, somewhere between opera and musical. Composer Stephen Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler reworked the famous urban legend “The ...