François Perrin is a journalist who reads the news on RTL radio. Alone in life, his only "amusement" is his neighbor from Africa, who makes mildly fun of him from time to time. One evening, François is bored, and decides to call a random telephone number. He gets Christine on the line, a bit of an old school pharmacist, who hesitates to put down the phone, and plays the game of seduction with the ...

Berlioz’s colossal masterpiece requires stupendous forces—dozens of soloists, enormous chorus, orchestra and ballet, a superb conductor who understands the uniqueness of the score—plus a production that does visual justice to the work. “A stupendous achievement” was one critic’s assessment of Peter Wexler’s inventive production. And with James Levine’s wizardry galvanizing the marvelous all-star c...

John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Orchestra of the Opéra National de Lyon in this 1987 production of Claude Debussy’s opera of jealously and love denied, “Pelléas et Mélisande”, starring Colette Alliot-Lugaz and François Le Roux in the lead roles. The production places the story in vast gloomy castle halls, a sparse but atmospheric environment that only adds to the opera’s sense of dark beauty enta...

François Perrin is a journalist who reads the news on RTL radio. Alone in life, his only "amusement" is his neighbor from Africa, who makes mildly fun of him from time to time. One evening, François is bored, and decides to call a random telephone number. He gets Christine on the line, a bit of an old school pharmacist, who hesitates to put down the phone, and plays the game of seduction with the ...