Bernard Foccroulle
The composer Bernard Foccroulle
"This morning, Wednesday 28 December 2022, I sent the publisher Ricordi the orchestral score for my opera Cassandra. Four hundred carefully etched pages, which I’ve attentively proofread and corrected. By doing so, I wrapped up a job I started in spring 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, in close collaboration with Matthew Jocelyn, author of the libretto and Louis Geisler, the dramaturge. Over time, the team has been enhanced by the involvement of stage director Marie-Eve Signeyrole and conductor Kazushi Ono, as well as the singers who I’ve talked to in person or remotely. I’ve sent them excerpts of the score and gradually, I’ve tried to adapt the score as closely as possible to their vocal qualities.
The pandemic and lockdown enabled me to dedicate myself immediately to the project’s development, and to start composing from summer 2020. Six months later, I had a first fruitful work session with Katarina Bradic, who is playing Cassandra. I had already seen and heard her at work during my tenure as Director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, where Katarina sung the role of Bradamante magnificently in our 2015 production of Alcina.
These workshops during composition are extremely useful, because they enable you to make more in-depth contact with the performers, to check certain aspects of the vocal writing, in a nutshell, to start making the essentially solitary work of musical composition concrete."