Who hasn’t heard of Candide, a naive young man who lives through extraordinary adventures, the anti-hero who emerged straight from the ironic quill of Voltaire? Yet Candide is also a comic operetta by Leonard Bernstein. The exact counterpart and contemporary of West Side Story, his Candide contrasts the manifesto of a modern, urban and rhythmical America with a Europe where gavottes and waltzes accompany the misfortunes of the young Candide on the Old Continent, misfortunes that make up his philosophical inititation. With its singular absence of jazz, one could almost take offence at Candide … if it did not contain a passionate homage to a landscape inaccessible to our eyes: the Europe of the Enlightenment, viewed from America, and delivered in an extremely sarcastic tone! In this semi-scenic version, Patrick Leterme and Charles Michiels direct a 100-per-cent Belgian team: the Candide Symphonic Orchestra, a choir composed of singers at the dawn of a promising career. Alongside them, young Belgian soloists: Thomas Blondelle, Sarah Defrise, Shadi Torbey, etc. So many talents engaging passionately with Bernstein’s score and the civic values conveyed by his libretto, which will lead you in the wake of Candide’s mad adventures to discover his strange rite of passage.

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