Giacinto Scelsi, music | Pauline Vaillancourt, concept and stage direction | Massimo Guerrera, installation | Nancy Bussières, lighting | Marianne Thériault, costumes | Jacques-Lee Pelletier, make-up | Michel Giroux and Jean Décarie, video
Marie-Annick Béliveau, mezzo-soprano
Pre-recorded musicians: Julien Grégoire, François Gauthier, percussion | René Gosselin, double bass | Simon Stone, saxophone
Pauline Vaillancourt, soprano (premiere)
Collaboration with Hexagram-UQAM | Centre de recherche en arts médiatiques
March 12, 13, 14, 2015, Usine C, Montreal
Premiere details
2015 — Prix Opus “Musical event of the year”.
An operatic performance piece created in 1995, in coproduction with the Montreal Contemporary Art museum (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal), Chants du Capricorne was conceived by the soprano and stage director Pauline Vaillancourt, who presented the piece at Vooruit in Ghent, Belgium, when she received the Prix d’interprète de musique contemporaine Flandres-Québec.
Now twenty years later, after an international tour and enormous praise from critics, Chants Libres is remounting this still universal and current opera, this time performed by the mezzo-soprano Marie-Annick Béliveau, a rising star in contemporary opera.
An audacious performance piece requiring the meticulous skills of a watchmaker, Chants du Capricorne is a ritual, a staging of the sacred and the immortal, where music is stripped of all pretences to embrace all cultures.
“From Chants du Capricorne emerges the power of incantation that draws us to our roots, to that within each of us is the least explored our primitive instinct.” — Georges Nicholson