Carmina Burana is back
after a 21-year absence!

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal presents Carmina Burana and Stabat MATER in a double program

From October 3 to 19, the 2019-2020 season will kick off with a double program featuring Edward Clug’s Carmina Burana and Stabat MATER. Carmina Burana is finally back with the company for the first time since 1998, the year Fernand Nault’s fabulous production, created in 1966, was last staged here.

Romanian choreographer Edward Clug revisits a powerful and entirely humanizing 20th-century work in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The piece was inspired by medieval poems, and its introduction, O Fortuna, evokes the fate of the world as men find themselves powerless in the face of an uncertain future.

Over 150 artists will gather onstage for a formidable spectacle: 40 dancers, the 70 musicians of the Grands Ballets Orchestra, 40 choral singers and 5 renowned solo singers, including soprano Aline Kutan, tenor Spencer Britten and bass-baritone Alexandre Sylvestre.

The artistic director of Les Grands Ballets decided to call once more on the services of the gifted choreographer Edward Clug, firmly anchored in modernity, in order to reflect the implicit torment of Carmina Burana, but also and above all springtime, hope and love, central themes of the work, one that reaches out to human beings in their most visceral dimension: that of our legacy, and of our continued existence.

We have learned from history that only human feelings are constant; only the esthetic and the context change. Carmina Burana could be simply described as an ode to life, which reaches from daily human rituals to the greatest universal mysteries.

Edward Clug

The evening will culminate with an essential work, one that has enjoyed earlier success at Les Grands Ballets: Stabat MATER, a production in which audiences will get to discover the immense talent and the maturity of the Grands Ballets Orchestra. Deeply affecting in its expressiveness, this is a work of meditation and reverence, a pure metaphysical masterwork that is first and foremost, for choreographer Edward Clug, a bearer of hope.