The Exterminating Angel

The Exterminating Angel (2024)

Music

After last season’s The Dante Project, the Paris Opera continues to explore the music of contemporary composer Thomas Adès with the French premiere of The Exterminating Angel. Inspired by Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surrealist film, which offered a scathing critique of the bourgeoisie, the work begins with a dinner among upper-class friends in a plush mansion after an opera performance. But, gradually, a mysterious force prevents the fifteen guests from leaving the reception. In this confinement for no apparent reason, drawn out over several days, the veneer of propriety cracks, revealing the worst of human nature. Thomas Adès has written a rich and tense score, amplifying the libretto’s strange atmosphere with unusual instruments such as the ondes Martenot. The Paris Opera has entrusted the staging of this huis-clos to Calixto Bieito. The director has long been fascinated by Buñuel’s universe.

Director: Calixto Bieito

Casts

	Jacquelyn Stucker as Lucia de Nobile
	Gloria Tronel as Leticia Meynar
	Hilary Summers as Leonora Palma
	Claudia Boyle as Silvia de Avila
	Christine Rice as Blanca Delgado
	Amina Edris as Beatriz
	Nicky Spence as Edmundo de Nobile
	Frédéric Antoun as Comte Raul Ybenes
	Jarett Ott as Colonel Alvaro Gomez
	Anthony Roth Costanzo as Francisco de Avila
	Filipe Manu as Eduardo
	Philippe Sly as Senor Russel
	Paul Gay as Alberto Roc
	Thomas Adès as Conductor

Crew