Portrait d'orchestre

With Portrait d’orchestre, stage director and scenographer Aurélien Bory offers a strikingly original approach to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”. The audience is invited not only to hear the concert, but to experience it visually as a kind of living tableau, through an ever-shifting relationship between music and image closely attuned to the score’s emotional force. Using cameras mounted on the music stands and a team of videographers moving through the orchestra, the production draws the audience into the heart of the symphony, focusing on the orchestra’s collective energy— the faces, presences and intensities that shape it. Captured and projected live, the musicians themselves become the true stage for emotion. This attention to what Gilles Deleuze called “affects” reveals Beethoven as a profoundly human adventure as much as a musical one — an experience carried by the violin of the orchestra’s principal soloist, Éléonore Darmon.