Giacinto Scelsi, music | Pauline Vaillancourt, concept and stage direction | Massimo Guerrera, installation | Louis-Philippe Demers, lighting | Massimo Guerrera, costumes | Jacques-Lee Pelletier, make-up | Michel Giroux, video
Pauline Vaillancourt, soprano
Pre-recorded musicians: Julien Grégoire, François Gauthier, percussion | René Gosselin, double bass | Simon Stone, saxophone
Marie-Annick Béliveau, mezzo-soprano (reprise)
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
World premiere
May 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 1995, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Diffusion
Dec. 8, 1995, Premiere Dance Theatre, Toronto
April 12, 1996, Usine C, Montreal
Feb 13, 1999, Vooruit, Belgium
Nov. 10, 1999, Théâtre Centaur, Montreal
Reprise
March 12, 13, 14, 2015, Usine C, Montreal
Prix d’interprète de musique contemporaine Flandres-Québec (1999).
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
