The first a premiere, the second of recent vintage. Both constructed on count downs (the first, one hour, the second, two hours) — thus the Opéra de Lyon’s Winter Festival counterbalanced its sprawling, endless La forza del destino.
The L’Avenir nous le dira is a loose equivalent of the expression “time will tell.” Born and educated in Singapore, Paris based composer Diana Soh enthralled us with a one hour piece for 37 singers of the Opéra national de Lyon’s white voices (childrens chorus) and an orchestra of mechanical noise makers — a huge and spectacular contraption of various sounding apparatus that made plunks, knocks and pings — to words contrived by French actress/playwright Emmanuelle Destremau.
The piece’s quite brilliant conception is credited to French stage director Alice Laloy.
It was a seemingly complex and difficult score. It was amazing that it was seemingly flawlessly executed by children. Even more surprising is that it was double cast. The vocal score was therefore mastered by 74 Lyonnais children, the six performances evenly split. The opera is a joint commission with the Opéra de Lorraine (Nancy).
It is not an opera for an audience of children (though there were many, many children present). While it was highly amusing to watch the stage action, the opera’s philosophic premises were subtle, esoteric and obscure. Essentially the sound machine is both creator and oracle. It creates the beings (children) who invent sounds, then words. They become a part of the machine. The machine can know the future, thus it becomes an oracle which can answer its own questions — and its children ask many, many questions.
Finally there will be the Oracle ceremony in which a face will be created, with a mouth, which will pronounce the words that reveal the future. Never to forget that there has been but one hour to accomplish all this (we watched a clock ticking). But at the end the children sing a hymn that celebrates the simple act of being, the future remains hidden.
A huge question remains: how were the movements of the noise machine set in motion? The Lyon L’Avenir nous le dira was co-realized with Lyon’s Théâtre National Populaire, in one of the TNP theaters. An army of stagehands took a bow, evidently the hands that motivated the sounds. But who gave the cues? Not to mention the biggest question of all: how, and what amount of rehearsal was needed for Clément Brun and Louis Gal, the music directors of the production, to bring these 74 youngsters to such a high level of musical accomplishment?
7 minuti, consiglio di fabbrica is a 2014 play by Italian playwright Stefano Massini, based on a then recent, actual labor situation somewhere in Italy. Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli rendered it as a sung play in 2019 when it had its premiere as an opera — at the Opéra national de Lorraine, though with an all Italian cast! The Opéra de Lyon has created a new mise-en-scène by Pauline Bayle, director of the Théâtre Public de Montreuil, with Spanish conductor Miguel Pérez Iñesta. Its cast of 11 women comes from the diverse countries of the Western world where such disputes may occur.
Mr. Battistelli’s transformation of the play into an opera libretto has resulted in a tight, two hour, through composed confrontation of ten hourly workers (women) at a lingerie factory with the woman they have charged with bargaining for them. This woman/negotiator is much older, and therefore, one assumes, much wiser.
We come to understand much about each of the women through their interactions — they are not complex characters though each projects an individual personality, of varying degrees of charm. Each of course had her specific voice and register, creating a bit of musical color within the overwhelming force of the all female operatic sound. Composer Battistelli’s melodically disjointed, contemporary style vocal lines are sung against (not in collaboration with) the independent disjointed contemporary style orchestral colorations.
We learn that the “cravatte” (“cravates” in French, “men with neckties” in English translation), to save the factory, wish its hourly workers to accept a reduced break time, the allotted 15 minutes reduced by seven minutes! Over time the women deduce that this will result in 600 minutes, collectively, of additional work each month — according to the libretto, it is not an easily verifiable number.
The “cravatte” must have the answer by 8 PM (within two hours), or presumably they will close the factory. Blanche, the workers’ representative, will refuse to accept. Over time, the deadline looming, we watch the various voting processes. Finally Blanche convinces four of the women to accept her stance. The final vote is five votes to accept, and five to reject, with one final vote to be counted. Sophie, a stratospheric soprano, announces that she has decided. The opera abruptly ended, we were left hanging.
Giorgio Battistelli has a huge catalog of works for the theater, including a piece to the words of environmental activist, failed U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. The role of Blanche, the bargaining agent, was magisterially undertaken by Austrian mezzo soprano Natascha Petrinsky. The workers were all singers of fine accomplishment in contemporary vocal genres.
Michael Milenski
L’Avenir nous le dira. Théâtre National Populaire, Lyon, France, March 16, 2025
7 Minutes, Opéra Nouvel, Lyon, France, March 18, 2025
All photos courtesy of the Opéra national de Lyon