FULL DREAM REQUIEM (Rufus Wainwright) Paris 2024 Meryl Streep
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Dream Requiem
- Composer: Wainwright Rufus
- Libretto: based on a text by Lord Byron and the Requiem Mass
- Venue & Opera Company: Auditorium de Radio France, Paris
- Recorded: June 14, 2024
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Meryl Streep
- Conductor: Mikko Franck
- Orchestra: Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France
- Chorus: MAÎTRISE DE RADIO FRANCE, CHŒUR DE RADIO FRANCE
- Chorus Master: MARIE-NOËLLE MAERTEN, GUILLEMETTE DABOVAL
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: ARTE
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, frsubs
- Video Recording from: ARTE FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
The iconic American screen actress, recipient of the Palme d’Or d’honneur at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is the narrator in Rufus Wainwright’s Dream Requiem, which receives its world premiere on 14th June in Paris.
Dream Requiem stems from two creative and musical ideas which matured in parallel in Rufus Wainwright’s mind and which were brought together in 2020 by two events of dramatic consequence: the COVID-19 pandemic and the California wildfires.
Rufus Wainwright’s fascination for the Requiem as a form goes back to his early teenage years, when he first heard Giuseppe Verdi’s setting of the Mass for the dead. The experience transformed him as a human being and pointed the way for him as an artist. Opera became his ‘secret weapon’ as a singer-songwriter and he has composed two operas of his own: Prima Donna and Hadrian.
For Wainwright, writing a Requiem at the time of COVID was both highly stimulating and strikingly relevant: “A Requiem for the people we have lost in this crisis, for the past from which we are cut off and for the future which we do not yet know how to connect to, a Requiem for the human touch, togetherness and the human voice which all had become dangerous and contagious during the pandemic.”
Recognising the recent rise in the incidence of natural catastrophes, he combines the Latin text of the Mass with Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem ‘Darkness’, written after the 1815 eruption of the volcano Mount Tambora, located in what is now Indonesia. The subsequent global dispersion of ash gave rise to the so-called Year Without a Summer.
Quoted from Radio France