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Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Champs Elysées Review

This theater is not on the famous Avenue des Champs-Élysées, but is several blocks from there near the Place de l'Alma on the right bank of the Seine. This is a very swanky district of Paris, in fact the whole neighborhood reeks of money.

Of all the opera venues I went to this was the one with the highest percentage of men wearing suits and ties, maybe 35 or 40 percent. These looked to be high-powered business types who had come directly from their air-conditioned offices in their air-conditioned chauffer-driven automobiles. But the theater itself was not adequately air-conditioned, so it was amusing to watch some of these chaps (not all) finally give in and start taking off their jackets and loosening their ties.

The theater is unusual in that it is barely a century old, having been built in 1913. It is said to be one of the few major examples of Art Nouveau in Paris. The stage is small and has little in the way of fancy machinery, so to change sets that have to lower the curtain and play a scene or two in front of it while armies (evidently) of stage hands change everything around by muscle-power, not without all the old-timey thumping and thudding sounds that you don't hear any longer in modernized theaters where everything is done by hydraulics or electricity.

Second photo: Looking up at the façade.

Third photo: Looking southwest along the Avenue Montaigne past the entrance to the theater.

Fourth photo: Stage entrance.

Fifth photo: Opps, there's only one man wearing a suit and tie in this photo. So you'll have to take my word for it that there were more inside.

Address: 15 Avenue Montaigne - 75008 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 8045
Métro Alma-Marceau
Bus 42, 63, 72, 80, 92

Phone: 01 49 52 50 50

Website: http://www.theatrechampselysees.fr/

Don Giovanni at the Champs-Élysées Champs Elysées Review

The opera I saw in 2006 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was Mozart's Don Giovanni. It was a festival of voices with world-class singers including Lucio Gallo and Anna Bonitatibus, both of who have given gala performances in Frankfurt, and Patricia Ciofi, whom I had seen on television but never live.

The setting in this production was a somewhat seedy little seaside town in present-day Spain or Italy, with Don Giovanni as a somewhat pimpish local potentate. What really impressed me was the ending, in which stage director Andre Engel managed to combine the last two scenes (I've never seen that done before). And after all these many years (this opera is 219 years old, after all) he even came up with a surprise ending.

Shall I tell you what it is? After the final jubilation chorus about how he got what was coming to him, Don Giovanni emerged unscathed from the flames, dusted off his dapper three-piece suit and stood there with a triumphant smirk on his face as the curtain fell.

Update: In May 2013 I saw the same opera in the same theater -- but in a different production with a different cast. Musically it was again first-rate and the audience was very enthusiastic. Prolonged rhythmic clapping at the final bows. A great thing for me was that two old friends from Frankfurt were in the cast this time: Miah Persson as Donna Elvira and Daniel Behle as Don Ottavio.

Second and third photos: The audience in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, 2006.

Fourth photo: People in the lobby of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, 2013.

Fifth photo: In the auditorium, 2013.

Related tips:
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées
Concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 2012

Address: 15 Avenue Montaigne - 75008 Paris

Directions: Vélib' 8045
Métro Alma-Marceau
Bus 42, 63, 72, 80, 92

Phone: 01 49 52 50 50

Website: http://www.theatrechampselysees.fr/

Mozart in the rain Jardins du Luxembourg Review

It only rained once during the ten days I was in Paris in June 2006, and that was –- you guessed it –- ten minutes before show time at an open-air opera performance in the Senate Gardens, which are in the Luxembourg Gardens right behind Luxembourg Palace.

A nice announcer on the PA system said the shower had been "annoncé pour cinq minutes" and thanked us for remaining in our seats. After five minutes the rain seemed to be letting up a bit, so they started the overture (the orchestra was under a roof, but someone had to hold an umbrella over the conductor) and the singers and dancers started doing their thing in the rain.

After a few more minutes it became clear that "ça n'a pas l'air de s'arranger", so they asked us to retain our tickets and come back the following Sunday evening, same time same place. This was lucky for me because Sunday was the only evening I still had free.

Later they sent an e-mail confirming the change of date, which I thought was very good service. They had my e-mail address because I had originally booked online.

Second photo: Here's what the venue looked like the day before while they were getting it set up.

Third photo: Here it's already looking a bit stormy. The building is Luxembourg Palace, which is the meeting place of the French Senate.

Fourth photo: I wasn't the only one to stop and take a picture of the Medici Fountain, which was commissioned in 1624 by the notorious Marie de Medici, widow of the murdered king Louis IV. I wonder what that voluminous lady would think of the recent funny addition to her reflecting pool.

Fifth photo: But I was the only one to stop and take a picture of this bust of Henri Murger (1822-1861), who is best known as the author of Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, the book that inspired Puccini's (and Leoncavallo's) opera La Bohème.

Directions: Vélib' 6017 -- 34 rue Conde
Location on the Vélib' map.

La Flûte Enchantée Jardins du Luxembourg Review

On Sunday the weather held, so we had an uninterrupted performance of The Magic Flute in honor of the 250th birthday of its composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

It was sung in German with French titles. The performance was adequate but not outstanding. There were no Germans in the cast, but they sang the German text well enough; most professional singers can sing in any language if they are well enough prepared.

But the spoken dialogues were something else again. They sounded like a class play after an intermediate German class at the Goethe Institute. I would have given the tenor a B- and flunked everybody else.

But it was fun just seeing and hearing that great and very familiar opera in such a brilliant setting on a cool evening after a hot day of cycling.

Second photo: Here we all are getting up to leave at the end of the performance, shortly before midnight.

Third photo: The Luxembourg Gardens as seen from the Montparnasse Tower. If you enlarge the photo you might be able to make out the bleachers behind the palace.

Fourth photo: A wider view from the same vantage point, showing the Luxembourg Gardens surrounded by lots of city streets and buildings.

Salle Pleyel

For a long time Paris was in the peculiar situation of having five opera houses but not a single world-class concert hall.

This changed in September 2006 with the reopening of the totally refurbished Salle Pleyel, an Art Deco concert hall that was originally built in 1927 by the Pleyel piano company. For decades it was the leading classical music venue in Paris, even though the acoustics and appearance of the building suffered from a series of botched renovation projects over the years.

Finally in 2004 the hall was closed for two years, and "a major architectural and acoustic renovation program" was carried out. At the same time new chairs were installed and the number of seats was reduced to 1,913 (instead of the original 3,000) so as to provide more comfort and leg-room for the audience.

Concerts at the re-opened Salle Pleyel are often sold out, but my son and I both managed to get last minute tickets at 10 Euros each (he being under 27 and I being over 60) for a concert performance of the opera Tancredi, by Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868).

Second photo: The entrance hall at street level.

Third photo: The rotunda in the upper lobby was a part of the original building, but was destroyed during renovation work in the 1960s. It has now been re-created from the original plans.

Fourth photo: Intermission in the upper lobby.

Fifth photo: The auditorium.

Address: 252, rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris

Directions:
Vélib' 8054
48°52'36.95" North; 2°18'3.32" East
Métro Ternes

Phone: 01 42 56 13 13

Website: http://www.sallepleyel.fr/

Concerts at Radio France Maison Radio - France Review

I have a thing about woodwind instruments. If I believed in reincarnation I think I would want to come back as a flute. But only as a particular flute played by one particular person.

The concert I went to at the House of Radio France was all about woodwind instruments in the works Francis Poulenc (1899-1963). It was a family concert at 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning, with lots of children but also numerous adults in the audience.

Since I knew very little about Poulenc this was quite educational for me as I'm sure it was for the children, and it also cleared up any doubts I might have had about what the instruments are called in French. The oboe is an hautbois, which is no doubt the source of the English and German word oboe, and a horn is a cor, otherwise no surprises. The musicians were members of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France, and the concert was taped for broadcast on France Musique the following week.

Second photo: This concert hall and broadcast studio is named after another French composer, Olivier Messiean (1908-1992).

Third photo: Part of the audience and one of the technicians.

Fourth photo: The musicians and the moderator, Jean-Francoise Zygel, taking their bows at the end of the concert.

Fifth photo: The House of Radio France as seen from a tethered balloon at a height of 150 meters.

By coincidence I recently attended a similar concert in Frankfurt am Main. At the hr studios I ran into Holger Falk, who asked me if I was on my way to the Large Broadcast Hall. I said no, and asked what was going on there. "I'm singing there," he said, and he smuggled me in. It turned out to be an hr-Domino children's concert with singers personifying different instruments. Holger was a proud Spanish torero representing the trumpet. Both of these concerts, in Frankfurt and in Paris, were highly entertaining and musically first-rate.

Address: 116 av du Président-Kennedy

Directions: Vélib' 16024
RER C : Radio-France

Phone: 01 42.30.15.16

Website: http://www.radiofrance.fr/

Parc de la Villette Parks, Gardens, and Squares Review

In the far northeast corner of Paris is the Parc de la Villette, a 55 hectare park with 35 hectares of lawns and gardens, on the site of the former slaughterhouses of la Villette. They say this is now the largest green space in Paris, and also "a laboratory of cultural democratization where art and society hold a dialogue."

Two major museums, one for science and one for music, are embedded in the park, and there are also two theaters, the Zenith concert hall, two cabarets, a pony club and an organization called G.E.R.M., which has nothing to do with germs but is devoted to the study of “Globalisations”, by which they mean "all cultural, social, economic and political processes which are circulated at world scale, despite national, geographic, technological and linguistic barriers." (As opposed to the more commonly used singular form "globalisation", which they say merely takes the economic side into account.)

And this park is now a real pleasure to cycle to since the new bike lanes and bus-bike lanes have been built along the busiest parts of the Avenue Jean Jaurès.

Second photo: Relaxing on one of the many lawns at Parc La Villette

Third photo: The Grande Halle was built in the 19th century and in 1985 was turned into an all-purpose space for exhibitions and trade fairs. It is currently being renovated and will re-open later in 2006.

Fourth photo: The information center and ticket office at the south entrance to the park, of Avenue Jean Jaurès.

Website: http://www.villette.com/

Concert at La Villette Music Review

The concert I attended at La Villette was in the "Amphitheatre" (which is down in the basement, actually) of the Cité de la Musique.

This concert was held at 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning, and was part of a festival called musikalia. The musicians were a flutist, a clarinetist, a pianist, a harpist and a string quartet, playing chamber music works for various combinations of instruments by Debussy, Calpet, Ravel and also by the contemporary French composer Eric Tanguy, who was in the audience and came up to make a few introductory remarks before his Second String Quartet was played.

Second photo: The Amphitheatre before the concert. It was pleasantly cool down there, by the way, on such a hot summer day.

Third photo: Seating in the Amphitheatre.

Fourth photo: The musicians taking their bows.

Directions: Vélib' 19018
48°53'22.52" North; 2°23'36.58" East.

Website: http://www.citedelamusique.fr/anglais/Default.aspx

Music museum Music Review

Nearly a thousand musical instruments and works of art are on display at the attractive and informative music museum, which covers the two hundred years from the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the 19th.

Second photo: At the entrance to the museum you can pick up an audio guide, which is included in the cost of admission. You have your choice of French or English, but you have to decide on one or the other; there's no way to switch languages once you are inside. (No photography is allowed in the museum itself; sorry about that.) The explanations and musical selections on the audio guide are very good. As you listen you can walk around with a narrow radius to look at the various instruments that are on display, but if you stray too far you will lose the signal.

Third and fourth photos: Although the permanent exhibition is devoted mainly to the history of classical music, the temporary exhibits can be about music of any kind. When I was there they had an exhibition on John Lennon entitled Unfinished Music, dealing with his life and work in the 1970s after the breakup of the Beatles.

Several German cities also have museums with interesting collections of historical musical instruments, for instance Berlin, Stuttgart and Nürnberg.

And there is a brilliant new one in Brussels, Belgium.

Address: Cité de la musique, 221 avenue Jean-Jaurès

Directions: Vélib' 19018
Location on the Vélib' map
Métro: Porte de Pantin
48°53'22.52" North; 2°23'36.58" East

Phone: 01 44 84 44 84

Website: http://www.cite-musique.fr

National Museum of the Middle Ages Musée du Moyen Age (Middle Ages) - Musée de Cluny Review

This museum itself is historical, since it was founded in 1843. The building is the house of the Cluny Abbots, built in the late fifteenth century on the site of the Gallo-Roman baths from the first to third centuries.

Parts of the original Gallo-Roman baths are still (or again) visible, so when you go down some steps you are suddenly dropped from the Middle Ages back into Roman times, more than a millennium earlier.

Second photo: Excavations and building projects in the nineteenth century turned up numerous medieval statues, often without heads, since in some phases of French history it was the custom to behead the statues of people they no longer liked, such as kings or bishops.

Third photo: But the heads were also found and brought to the museum.

Fourth photo: In a temporary exhibition in 2012 the National Museum of the Middle Ages was displaying this intricately carved guiterne from the 14th-century. The guiterne was an ancestor of the guitar, but this one was transformed into a violin in the 16th century, which is why it looks like a mixture of both.

Fifth photo: The National Museum of the Middle Ages in Cluny Abbey sometimes offers concerts of medieval music, but the one I wanted to attend in 2006 was unfortunately cancelled because of the illness of one of the musicians.

Next review from January 2012: Woodcarvings in the Cluny museum

Address: 6 place Paul Painlevé, 75005 Paris

Directions:
Vélib' 5030
Métro Cluny-Sorbonne or Saint-Michel
GPS 48°51'1.17" North; 2°20'38.73" East

Phone: 01 53 73 78 00

Website: http://www.musee-moyenage.fr/