Poulenc Double Bill
From intimate tragedy to giddy, surreal comedy: this double-bill of La voix humaine and Les mamelles de Tirésias has it all
Public booking opens on Sunday 6 March 2022
About the opera
A woman on the brink of ending it all; another just beginning
Director Laurent Pelly joins conductor Robin Ticciati for a French double-bill that opens with tragic heartbreak and ends with a riotous, surreal comedy.
Alone in her apartment, a woman talks to her former lover on the telephone. She teases, flirts, promises, lies and pleads. Finally, she winds the cord of the phone around her neck and, telling him she loves him, drops the receiver… Poulenc’s La voix humaine is opera distilled down to its essence: a musical monologue of searing intensity.
Frustrated with her life as a housewife, Thérèse transforms herself into a man and heads out into the world, leaving her husband at home to take care of the baby-making. Exploding with musical invention, combining everything from patter songs to Broadway numbers, chorales and lyrical arias, Poulenc’s Les mamelles de Tirésias is a giddy romp of an opera that throws questions of politics, gender and society up into the air and watches them shatter into hundreds of glittering pieces.
A new production for Festival 2022. Sung in French with English supertitles.
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Creative team
Conductor
Robin Ticciati
Director
Laurent Pelly
Set Designer
Caroline Ginet
Costume Designer
Laurent Pelly in collaboration with Jean Jacques Delmotte
Lighting Designer
Urs Schönebaum
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The Glyndebourne Chorus
Cast includes
Elle
Stéphanie d’Oustrac
Theatre Director / Gendarme
Lionel Lhote
Thérèse / Fortune Teller
Elsa Benoit
The Husband
Régis Mengus
Monsieur Lacouf
François Piolino
Monsieur Presto
Christophe Gay
The Parisian Journalist
Loïc Félix
The Newspaper Woman
Julie Pasturaud
Musical editions: La voix humaine – Ricordi Paris | Les mamelles de Tirésias – Édition Heugel Wise Music Group
Illustration © Katie Ponder