On May 4 Zoi Tsokanou is set to lead the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Elixir Symphonique at the Pôle Nord Festival in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
The program includes a rendition of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), arranged for chamber orchestra by Thierry Blondeau in 2002, Gérard Grisey’s Partiels (1975) for a set of 18 instruments, and the world premiere of Daniel Zea’s Florox (2024), commissioned by the Les Amplitudes festival.
On May 6 Tsokanou picks up the baton to conduct a new production of Carmen by Sophia Al-Maria and Andrew Yee based on the opera by George Bizet at Schauspielhaus Zürich.
The Moved by the Motion production digs through the many layers of Carmen’s legacy while taking the canonical source material further. Bizet’s original score weaves together with musical interventions by composers Andrew Yee and Asma Maroof to create a hybrid opera-theatre piece. Working seamlessly with language, movement, image and song, Moved by the Motion forms a genre-bending adaptation that reinterprets the themes that Carmen embodies: love, loss and liberation.
