Casting
| Position | Name | Role |
| Chant / Singer | Xavier MAS | Arbace |
| Chant / Singer | Colin BALZER | Sacerdote |
| Chant / Singer | Luca TITTOTO | La voce |
| Chant / Singer | Sophie KARTHAUSER | Ilia |
| Chant / Singer | Richard CROFT | Idomeneo |
| Chant / Singer | Yann BEURON | Idamante |
| Chant / Singer | Mireille DELUNSCH | Elettra |
| Choeur / Chorus | RUNDFUNKCHOR BERLIN | |
| Compositeur / Composer | Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART | |
| Costumes | Pierre-André WEITZ | |
| Décorateur / Sets | Pierre-André WEITZ | |
| Direction musicale / Conductor | Marc MINKOWSKI | |
| Livret / libretto | Giambattista VARESCO | |
| Lumière / Lights | Bertrand KILLY | |
| Mise en scène / Stage Director | Olivier PY | |
| Orchestre / Orchestra | LES MUSICIENS DU LOUVRE |
Co Producers and Broadcasters (TV, cinema, Video)
FESTIVAL D'AIX EN PROVENCE
Line producer
Anne TARDIEU
The Idomeneo was just what a festival production should be — one well beyond the scope of an ordinary season of opera. The orchestra was Les Musiciens du Louvre – Grenoble, playing on period instruments, the conductor Marc Minkowski is a specialist in period style. The production, by Olivier Py, pushed the envelope with huge, stilt-legged, light metal platform constructions that were in continuous, balletic motion, no electronically controlled horsepower here, only the flexed muscles and sweat of ten (or so) formally dressed, athletic grips (stagehands), these classy oversized nibelungens always in full, working view.
Three and one half hours into the performance (performances begin a dusk, 9:30 PM, thus at 1 AM) we hit the ballet. Not only did the set elements begin to fly, i.e. move wildly around the stage, seven dancers retold the entire story in frenetic, fast forward pantomime for a final fifteen minutes. Then the house came down, including some French inflected boos (hoos in French). And the final curtain descended to a huge whoop from backstage — relief and pleasure that they had achieved a miracle, a flawless (or so it seemed) convergence of a myriad of elements realized against all possible odds.
The cast were fine young singers who continuously inter-played in complex staging with the monumental buildings of Crete, Idomeneo its shirt-sleaves-rolled-up master builder. Eminently striking was the use of a tenor voice for Idamante, Mozart’s original counter-tenor — the French back then and now too apparently never cottoning up to male mutilation even for artistic purposes. Absence of cross dressing (the mezzo as male) also makes story telling more direct these days though changing the clef (tessitura) of this voice robbed its music of much of its power.
Olivier Py’s concept was naive, if blatant — white and black, i.e. modern dressed Europeans and versus Africans in modern countryside regalia. Illa was a beautiful young singer of vaguely African origins, her dancer counterpart for the ballet was a lithely beautiful Black nymph, plus three strong, young black dancer warriors and two Brown Cretans. Not to mention a few real African figurants (supers). Of course the dynamic between Europeans and Africans is far from that of the Cretans and the Thebians so this heavy-handed social commentary look was far from appropriate. But who cares, the performance was magnificent.
When it was all over suspicions arose that we had not heard the piece, short of a couple of show-stopping arias in the first act, the famous third act quartet having been lost amongst the choreography of the singers moving within the moving set. But this suspicion was quickly supplanted by the notion that this had been a true gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of all the arts that make opera — the rigid and controlled tempos appropriate to Baroque musical structures were realized on the primitive versions of modern instruments melting into the stark architectural structures moving dance like on the stage together with the supple bodies and pure young voices of idealized Mozartian singers. This production was proof that this Mozart opera transcends its music”
Michael Milenski for Opera Today
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