Frank Zappa is a legendary figure on the American rock scene, but not so much on the opera one. Surprise! It is with his opera 200 Motels that Aviel Cahn has decided to close his tenure as General Director of the Grand Théâtre de Genève, which he inaugurated with the no less surprising choice of Philip Glass‘s Einstein on the Beach. Frank, Mark, Howard and their associates traverse the USA from town to town, motel to motel, excess to excess, delirium to delirium, gig to gig, always with reality catching them up. Clearly alter egos to Frank Zappa and his colleagues in The Mothers of Invention, they bring to life this American-style road-movie sitting somewhere between a dream, a bad trip and sophisticated, experimental mish-mash which flirts with the serious genres of classical and contemporary music, but also of rock-opera and musical. Before it was recorded by Esa-Pekka Salonen in Los Angeles in 2013, 200 Motels – The Suites had existed in so many different shapes that it‘s hard to trace the work‘s genealogy.

Both musician, poet, composer, band leader, producer, Frank Zappa is a cult icon who unites paradoxes and musical influences from Varèse and Berg to Ives and Stravinsky, to name but a few of his acknowledged peers. His work is only coherent when considered as a whole – what he himself called “conceptual continuity“, in which musical themes, ideas, characters and figures of speech meet from musical object to musical object, creating an infinite labyrinth of doubles. A crazy send-up of a project – 200 would have been the approximate number of concerts that The Mothers of Invention had performed at that point –, 200 Motels was first performed in its original form in 1970 by Zubin Mehta and the LA Philharmonic. After which 200 Motels became a film, before release on LP and later on CD.

At the helm of this unprecedented musical mockumentary of a psychedelic fresco, we have none other than opulent American director Daniel Kramer, who in our 2023 season, with the artists of TeamLab, amplified the spectacular aspect of Puccini‘s Turandot. In his hands, the American dream revamped by Frank Zappa to sit somewhere between political critique and dystopia, is likely to be skidding off in directions worthy of The Wizard of Oz, or perhaps even of master of horror Cronenberg‘s greatest period… Shaking the boards of the BFM under the baton of Titus Engel, who conducted Einstein on the beach in 2019, is a large, richly diverse team: among them, Robin Adams, recognised for his impressive Saint Francis of Assisi in the GTG, along with internationally acclaimed coloratura Brenda Rae, but also a rock band featuring revered guitarist Mike Keneally, plus Steambot Switzerland, the Swiss new music improv trio behind countless contemporary creations. Not to mention the OSR once again this season, at full strength, joined by young percussionists from the HEM.