"Antigone in the Dark", bright.
Third lyrical discovery of the week, [...] Antigone in the Dark is a real treasure. [...] Fifty minutes out of time, of extraordinary intensity, where Antigone, after being led - pushed - into her grave by the six musicians (Greek chorus before becoming an orchestra), retraces the circumstances of her conviction, justifies one last time her choices, launches her just reproaches, renews her love and merges into the light of death. Caròla's text (in English, surtitled in French) is that of a familiar of opera: poetic, precisely distanced, but of an authentic dramatic power, on which Stéphane Orlando has based himself to compose half a dozen characterized scenes, from epic to meditative, where the science of writing always supports emotion. Under his direction, each musician (including himself) plays his own instruments (piano, violin/alto, cello, flutes, clarinets) and various percussion instruments, while Antigone's singing unfolds, sovereign. The staging is meticulous and Rita Matos Alvez - at ease in all tessitura, and so beautiful... - confirms her immense qualities as an actress and singer.
Stéphane Orlando wins the Sabam for Culture Award for Contemporary Music
On Wednesday 4 March, as part of the 3rd edition of the Belgian Music Days in Mons, the Sabam for Culture Award for Contemporary Music was awarded to the talented Stéphane Orlando. Juror Martine Dumont-Mergeay put it this way: "His creativity is so versatile and his career so atypical that Stéphane Orlando - 41 this year - sometimes stayed under the radar of the general public. But his former professors - and today his students – as well as his colleagues and the audience at the Cinematek, where he has already accompanied more than 500 silent films, have always seen one of the most gifted musicians of his generation in this free and learned artist". Since 2019 he has shown his unbridled creativity, as evidenced by Le Musée du Silence and Une dernière étreinte, presented at the Festival Loop 2019, and by L'Examen and Figuratine, two pseudo-documentaries for which Orlando provided the music and which were broadcast during the 2019 ‘Semaine du Son’. In November last year, Stéphane Orlando presented the opera Antigone in the Dark (libretto by Lorenzo Carola), which was very much appreciated by the jury of Sabam and which largely earned him his nomination for this award.
Stéphane Orlando and Henri Storck, sound and image in the same relationship
Of Stéphane Orlando's music, I retain its integration into the projection, the discreet effacement at its service; I find it sometimes too timid, of a disconcerting classicism in the face of the film's committed revolt - but this is perhaps the price to be paid for establishing this relationship between the audience and the implacable images, of which Storck feared that a musical adaptation would deflate the subject matter, and which Orlando attempts to resolve through a structure devoid of excess detail, a relative distance, and a wide range of timbres.
Open-mindedness without compromise
Relevant, his composition is based on a great knowledge of the classical, baroque, romantic and modern past, and he has a subtle relationship with the voice. What's more, Stéphane Orlando likes jazz and jazzmen!
