May 2017

Festival de Lacoste

  • Pierre Cardin’s show

 

 

 
festival lacoste 2017

 

Eight nights of theatre and music in the wonderful setting of the old quarries at Château de Lacoste. For its 17th edition, the Festival puts the spotlight on Mozart.

 

Pierre Cardin’s creative energy is amazing! With his unfailing collaborator Ève Ruggieri, he’s once more dreamed up a wonderful programme for us.

 

Enchanting festival
First a recital by Sonya Yoncheva, singing Massenet, Puccini and Chopin. This looks like being an unforgettable evening; the German daily Die Welt has described Yoncheva as «the finest Violetta since Maria Callas». Then comes Mozart and his sublime Requiem, a work that tells of pain and the fear of death, that final combat, in which a triumphant outcome requires great talent in the orchestration, instrumentalists and singers (in this case Jodie Devos, Trystan Llyr Griffiths, Delphine Haidan, François Lis and the Stella Maris choir). In a different mood, there’s Mozart’s music for castrati. He composed for two young sopranists whose voices enchanted him. Later, those children denied their manhood were replaced by women in male dress. In this recital it’s mezzo-soprano Ambroisine Bré, accompanied by pianist Yoshiko Moriai, who brings those incredible voices back to life for us. Rounding off the festival, the Musicales du Lubéron and Paul Agnew offer selected Baroque pieces, with Dido as the common theme, from Desmarest to Purcell.

 

For laughs
On the theatre side, Gérard Chambre, a regular at the Festival, has put together two evenings with extracts from three Feydeau farces, On purge bébé, Mais ne te promène donc pas toute nue, and Feu la mère de Madame. Georges Feydeau’s plays, about a hundred in all, rewrote the rules of theatre; Gérard Chambre offers us a moving encounter with that tragi-comic dandy of the Belle Epoque. After which he talks about love in bed, in a heart-warming session of laughter therapy in which six actor-singers take us into the bedrooms of the love hotel.

 

Du 15 au 24 juillet - Carrières de Lacoste - www.festivaldelacoste.com