I hope it will be recorded or filmed!
But of course!
Here's more from the Royaumont site :http://www.royaumont.com
I visited the Abbey last year. A magical place! Take the virtual tour ..or go there ,sooner or later.
Lully/Quinault : Cadmus et Hermione
An operatic training and performance workshop
Production project from Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique, in coproduction with le Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and Royaumont Foundation.
Presentation
The Opera Comique, The Versailles Baroque Music Centre and Royaumont Foundation have joined
Poème Harmonique for an ambitious project based on Cadmus et Hermione. After the success enjoyed by the comedy-ballet Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme rehearsed and produced at Royaumont with a team of young singers, dancers and actors, Vincent Dumestre and Benjamin Lazar, this time in association with Gudrun Skamletz, are seeking to embark on an exploration of first lyric tragedy ; in 1673, Lully, a great admirer of Racine, created a new genre unique in Europe, with the poet Quinault. In Cadmus et Hermione, the music is not simply incidental, but carries the action entirely, creating with theatre and dance together in a single dramatic unity. This revolutionary work, and a veritable source for French Opera, combines the constitutive elements in a balanced way that guaranteed its success:
- the French recitatif, a form of sung declamation, which drives the action;
- the choir, whose essential role in the dramatics is akin to that of the antique chorus;
- the use of dance, inherited from court ballet, as a rhetorical and dramatic element;
- the alternation of glory and love themes with comic type scenes inherited from comedy-ballet;
- fantasy, that allows the appearance of gods and monsters, and encourages the more spectacular aspects provided by theatre machinery.Training and experimental work at Royaumont will make it possible to constitute a troop of singers, dancers and musicians, and who take all the time needed to explore the ways in which declamatory and other song, gestures and dance may be performed in this lyric tragedy, based on the historical investigative approach to the 17th century being carried out by Le Poème Harmonique with help from the Versailles Baroque Music Centre (Grandes journées Lully, Autumn 2008). The fruits of this multidisciplinary project will be shown to the public at the Opera Comique in Paris in February 2008, followed by performances at Versailles Royal Opera a tour in Autumn 2008.
Teachers
Vincent Dumestre, artistic director
Benjamin Lazar, stage director
Gudrun Skamletz, chorégraph
Le Poème Harmonique
Thomas Leconte, Jean Duron, musicologists (Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles)
Program
Vincent Dumestre, Benjamin Lazar and Gudrun Skamletz would like the work at Royaumont to provide an opportunity for research and reflection concerning 17th century language, its refined and subtle aspects, its colours and sounds, the way it is declaimed and sung, and its gestures, as well as its choreographic rhetoric along with the marvellous, monstrous and comic vocabularies. The experience gained from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (organic links between theatre, music and dance, reconstructed pronunciation, candle-lit staging and so on) will make it possible to take that research further.
Dates of training
- from 2 to 6 June 2007 (soloist singers only),
- from 20 to 29 July 2007 (tutti),
- from 30 November to 9 December 2007 (tutti).
11 soloist singers
15 chorus and coryphei singers
8 dancers.