Entertainment.TimesOnline.co.uk – Hugh Canning
Gyorgy Ligeti’s magnum opus, Le Grand Macabre, opens with a drunken Piet the Pot intoning the celebrated Judgment Day lines of the Latin requiem Mass: “Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla” (Day of anger, that day, shall reduce this generation into ashes). But he is too cheerful — being in a constant state of inebriation — to complete the sentence.
This great apocalyptic human comedy has been absent from the stages of Britain’s opera companies since the early 1980s. At the beginning of the 2009-10 season, English National Opera, which gave the British premiere of Ligeti’s original version in 1982, will present a new four-way co-production of it with the opera houses in Rome, Barcelona and Brussels, where La Fura dels Baus’s spectacular staging was unveiled on Tuesday. The young British conductor Leo Hussain led the orchestra of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in the pit.