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dom, episodic flow of events, this production explodes the mirage of a wellmade play. The characters spend their lives talking and waiting and waiting and talking, and, in the meantime, time passes, bringing not fulfillment but despair. Serban accentuates this despair by letting the various characters drift off into private, solipsistic reveries. Dialogue becomes monologue. No one listens to anyone else. When Andre tries to confess to his sisters in Act III and seek their forgiveness, Masha runs off to meet her lover and Olga and Irina doze off. When Masha tries to explain her secret happiness, Olga shuts up her ears. Irina pours out her soul to Chebutykin, who ducks into a newspaper. Not merely the best modernist Chekhov I have ever seen, but, quite simply, the best Chekhov. Against this bleak, existential nightmare of physical and metaphysical dispossession , what enables the three sisters to carry on? The title of the play gives the answer, and Serban etches in the life-sustaining bond between these three women with delicate force. We wait, expectantly, exaltantly, for those few, precious moments when the three sisters make contact with each other. In the final act, Serban has strewn the ground with red and yellow leaves. Autumn has come, the soldiers have left, and the three sisters are alone on the stage, exactly where they began. As they disappear again into the dark, they hold each other tightly in a community of love. AU GRAND SOLEIL D'AMOUR CHARGE Composed by Luigi Nono Directed by Jorge Lavelli The Lyon Opera (France) Georges Baal Au Grand Soleil d'Amour Charg6 (To the Great Love-Filled Sun) is a well known line from a poem of the young Rimbaud, written during the Paris commune in praise of a young woman revolutionary. It is also the title of the latest opera of the Italian composer, Luigi Nono. Au Grand Soleil d'Amour Charg6 was originally presented some years ago at La Scala in Milan, in a production by the Russian director, Ljubimov. The opera follows the revolutionary woman across two centuries, from the French Commune and turnof -the-century French strikes and Russian uprisings to the South American, Cuban, and Vietnamese liberation movements. There is no story, no plot. The text is comprised of writings from the French anarchist Louise Michel, Gorki's Mother, quotations from Marx, Lenin, and Che Guevara, and testimonies of anonymous women. But it is not a cantata , nor a communist mass. There is plenty of dramatic tension created by the presence of strong female figures, and, to a large extent, by workers, strikers, and soldiers. Using a device more familiar in avant-garde theatre than in the opera, each character is performed by several singers and each 73 singer performs several roles. Nono, referring to Fidelio and Lulu, says that "the characters of my work are not only related to historical fact, but they change with other characters related to other situations, and form a continuity of historical development." Jorge Lavelli directed the Lyon Opera's production of the Nono work. Lavelli, one of the leading French theatre directors (his Winter's Tale at Avignon was perhaps the best French Shakespeare since Vilar), is used to directing classical operas. For Au Grand Soleil he chose, however, an original but risky solution: to take the opera out of the opera house and into a large industrial building, and to present it as an enormous "happening." The difficulty of this enterprise can be measured by the fact that the work involves 11 solo parts, a large chorus of 35 and a smaller one of 20, an orchestra of 110 musicians (including 18 percussionists), sophisticated electronic music on tape, and 90 actors. Lavelli used a huge military storage building, devising two large settings in a turn-of-the-century industrial architecture style, with high ceilngs covered by glass, exposed metal structures, beams, rails on the floor, and two balconies . The action takes place all over and the spectator is free to move around, remain in place, or situate himself with the orchestra. The hardware , loudspeakers and TV screens are visible: Lavelli used 50 TV screens, cameras, and 25 miles of cables. Elements of modern...

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