Akhnaten streaming at Opéra de Nice during lockdown

During France's second COVID-19 lockdown, the Opéra de Nice Côte d'Azur streamed a shortened, violin-less production of Philip Glass's 'Akhnaten' on November 1, 2020, directed and choreographed by 80-year-old Lucinda Childs via videoconference from the United States. The opera, third in Glass's trilogy about 'men who changed the world through their ideas,' was created in 1984 in Stuttgart and uses ancient texts in Egyptian, Akkadian, and Hebrew. The production featured conductor Léo Warinsky, mezzo Julie Robard-Gendre as Nefertiti, soprano Patrizia Ciofi as Queen Mother Tye, haute-contre Fabrice di Falco as Akhnaten, and baritones Vincent Le Texier and Frédéric Diquero as generals and priests of Amon. Childs's staging, influenced by Noh theater and Robert Wilson's abstract elegance, projected her face in black and white as a narrator. The article contrasts this with the Opéra de Paris's abandoned virtual staging of Wagner's 'Ring des Nibelungen' by Calixto Bieito; only conductor Philippe Jordan secured two concert-version Ring festivals, the first canceled due to a COVID case, with the second scheduled for late December 2020 at Radio France's auditorium featuring potential singers Jonas Kaufmann, Iain Paterson, Martina Serafin, and Ekaterina Gubanova. The streaming remains available on YouTube, the Opéra de Nice website, and the City of Nice website.