- Massenet Festival
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Massenet Festival (or Festival Massenet in French) is a biennale festival of music by French composer, Jules Massenet held at Saint-Étienne, France, close to the area where the composer was born.
Following the initial success of staging Massenet's Amadis in 1988 during an "unofficial" festival of his work, the organizers decided to regularly fund these festivals starting in 1990. Thus initial founders of the Massenet Festival were Jean-Louis Pichon (director and principal producer) and Patrick Fournillier (musical director and conductor). So far only those earlier festival performances (before 1995) were released on audio CD (under the label Koch-Schwann) and are available to the public[1].
The First Massenet Festival took place in November 1990 and presented the opera Cléopâtre and the oratorio La Vierge.
Successive Festival highlights
Two years later, in 1992, Esclarmonde was staged (with the participation of Denia Mazzola Gavazzeni in the title role), while the Third Massenet Festival in 1994 brought revivals of such operas as Grisélidis, Panurge, and Le Cid.
Because the Esplanade Opera house in Saint-Étienne burned down in October 1998, the originally planned next festival was delayed for more than half a year.
Over succssive years, the following operas have been presented:
- Thaïs (1996).
- Le roi de Lahore (1999).
- Roma (November 2001).
- Sapho (2003).
- Le jongleur de Notre-Dame (2005).
- Ariane (2007).
- Manon (2009).
References
- Massenet Festival Official Web-site
- HighBeam Research on Massenet Festivals
- Int. Herald Tribune article on 7th Festival
- MusicWeb on 9th Festival
- On Partrick Fournillier
See also
Categories: Music festivals in France | Opera festivals
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