RFO Macabre
Artists
James Gaffigan
Conductor
Heidi Melton
Mescalina
Mescalina in
Le Grand Macabre
—
Radio Filharmonisch Orkest
In these times of pandemics, ecological catastrophes, bloody civil wars and political instability, it is hard to think of a more suitable opera than Le Grand Macabre by contrary avant-garde composer György Ligeti, a work that was based on the absurdist play La balade du Grand Macabre by the French-speaking Fleming Michel De Ghelderode. In bizarre scenes, we follow the drunkard Piet the Pot in his many encounters with carnal love and the naked political power struggle.
György Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre – which premièred in Stockholm in 1978 – is one of the 20th century’s most potent works of musical theatre. The piece is a cryptically coarse, garishly colourful, meticulously composed mixture of mediaeval mystery play, absurd theatre and ludicrous grotesquerie. In a polemical barb against the highbrow and restrictive ideologists of musical Modernism, Ligeti himself described the piece as an “anti-anti-opera.”
Details
Performances
Saturday, 27 November 2021
Location
The Royal Concertgebouw
Concertgebouwplein 10
1071 LN Amsterdam, Netherlands
Photo by Cheung Wai Lok