In Geneva, the golden dragon of fart eötvös<

By co-producing the golden dragon of fart Eötvös, the Grand Théâtre de Geneva, the Comedy of Geneva, the Nof-Nouvel Opéra Friborg and theBack reveal a cruel tale whose text questions globalization and the immigration policies.

We could also summarize the golden dragon of Peter Eötvös by quoting Philippe Meyer who finished his Voltairian radio chronicles on France-Inter by launching: "We live a modern era".Modern, music.Modern, the booklet.Modern, the subject.The modernity of ordinary people living in an ordinary society.

Five Asians are busy preparing a soup in the cramped kitchen for Thai-Chinese-Vietnamese "the golden dragon".Among them, the "youngest" suffers from a teeth that his status as an illegal and penniless resident prohibits care.The extraction of the carved tooth with the means will bring the drama, the impossible stop of the hemorrhage bearing the young man towards death.Around this microcosm, misery can be visited on all floors.She is a grandfather sharing his reflection on old age with her granddaughter.He's a combinard grocer.She is a young pregnant woman rejected by her companion receiving this pregnancy as a disaster.These are two tired Stewardess, one feared to be devoured by sharks in case their plane is damaged at sea while the other is interested in the tooth found in the soup.It is still a prostitute in the guise of a hungry cicada exploited by its pimp personified by an ant.Chronicle of ordinary misery.If the grandfather visits the cicada to see her helplessness there, if the companion of the pregnant woman violates the cicada until death, most of the eighteen characters of the plot do not seem to have common bonds otherwise theirSmall existence in society that has formed around them.Thus, little by little are played with dramas of a cruel and sordid banality.

In these twenty short scenes taking place at a sustained pace, Peter Eötvös and his Libretist Roland Schimmelpfennig grabs the tragic of their heroes.Directed with a happy nervousness, Julien Chavaz offers an intelligent and clear reading of this bushy piece.On a square plateau, with lighting (Eloi Gianini) participating in the plot, he draws his different characters by paranting them who with a cap, which of a wig, which of a trembling cane, his singers all dressed inBlue costumes, grimted in blue to the ears, enter and leave the set to play the different episodes of this human adventure.A set of scenes that Julien Chavaz dominates perfectly even if the tray often remains stripped of any accessory.Perfectly directed, the protagonists assert themselves as good actors as singers.Music at first glance chaotic illustrates the diversity of characters stuck in their problems.Humor, burlesque perceive themselves with this begging trombone, this laughing clarinet, these percussion chattering.Little by little, dramas materialize and, paradoxically, the more tragic the music is soothed.As if resignation won over dread and death.

In the last pages of this work, the chopped music of Peter Eötvös spins in a deep lyricism making heard a long and magnificent Cantilene of the Belgian soprano Sarah Defrise, singing the last trip of the clandestine thrown to the river (like ultimately his sick tooth) and deriving towards his mother country.If the vocal distribution excels, if everyone worked magnificently to bring this work to life (in Swiss creation after its world creation at the Frankfurt Opera in June 2014), the countertops set led by the young conductor GabriellaTeychenné is up to the complexity of the partition.At most, we would have liked that it was more present in the face of the sound volume of the singers, their proximity to the public often covering the sound of the orchestra.

Crédit photographique : © Magali Dougados

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