Jacques Offenbach

La Belle Hélène

This is a joy from beginning to end. Although there are many tricks and ideas from Laurent Pelly, as always he seems to still retain the Offenbach magic. La Lott and Monsieur Beuron are a joy, but so is everyone else. The Patriotic Trio by the sea is both a hoot and wonderfully sung, the score seems truly complete yet never flags and the finale sequences for especially acts 1 & 2 are a joy of movement and sound fused as one glorious Offenbachian moment.

Fantastiska pappa

Two men in love with Henriette Perrichon do their best to convince her father to pick them as her groom in mid 19th century France.

The Hotel New Hampshire

Over the course of several years beginning in the 1950s, a man and his oddball family run hotels in New England and Vienna, as unexpected events change their lives forever.

La Vie parisienne

Hoffmanns Erzählungen

Live performance, Bayerische Staatsoper, 2011. The Tales of Hoffmann (French: LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN) is an opéra fantastique by Jacques Offenbach that combines three short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann into a haunting whole: a melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer. One of the questions this opera poses for any director is how to link the 'tales' of Hoffmann's three lost loves together and knit them satisfactorily into the Prologue and Epilogue. In this production, Richard Jones solves the puzzle by turning it into an autobiographical journey which ends with a grand meet-up of all the characters Hoffmann has encountered: for once, Hoffmann is not presented as a rollicking kind of drunken story-spinner, but rather a sad-eyed, sobered-up depressive, who reaches for the bottle only because his disastrous love life has gone wrong yet again.

The Beautiful Lurette

The beautiful and charming laundress Lurette is a well sought-after young woman in Ludwig XV’s Paris. Her heart is already taken, however, and she makes elaborate plans during Carnival to obtain the man she truly loves, the carpenter Campistrel. During her plans to make Campistrel jealous and recognize his love for her, she meets the Duke of Marly, who plans to make her his mistress. The unsuspecting Lurette finds herself caught in a love triangle, and her peer, Marcelline, must save the beautiful Lurette from these scandalous schemes.

The Tales of Hoffmann

A melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer.

Ludwig

Historical evocation of Ludwig, king of Bavaria, from his crowning in 1864 until his death in 1886, as a romantic hero. Fan of Richard Wagner, betrayed by him, in love with his cousin Elisabeth of Austria, abandoned by her, tormented by his homosexuality, he will little by little slip towards madness.