I'm just back from a month working with the wonderful Laurent Pelly, in Grenoble, close to where I spent a year as a student, and where I met the teacher who persuaded me to try my luck at training to be a professional singer! After 'La Belle Hélène' and 'La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein', 'La Voix Humaine' was rather a different Laurent Pelly experience, but very rewarding: he doesn't let you get away with anything, so one is constantly challenged and forced to concentrate like mad! Voix Humaine is a really hard piece to learn, and in some ways, having learnt it, one goes into 'automatic' in order to perform it: it's one of those pieces that if you start thinking about it with every part of your mind while you're doing it, you get it wrong! But it was so good to have Laurent constantly saying things like 'I don't believe there is anyone on the end of that phone: we should be able to imagine the man from the way you react to his words.' I think it sometimes worked!

And the Grenoble Maison de la Culture staff, as well as the Lyon Opera, are terrific: we had a great time and the two performances went very well. The second half of the evening was 'Bluebeard's Castle', which I am ashamed to say I didn't know at all but found deeply disturbing, threatening and oppressive. Hedwig Fassbender and Peter Fried were marvellous- and super almost-colleagues! And the conductor Juraj Valcuha got some beautiful playing from the orchestra. The sets in both operas were very lively parts of the performances, particularly so in the Bartok, and added enormously to the suffocating nature of the piece- bravo to Chantal Thomas, and to the technicians moving them around! I'm looking forward very much to doing more performances in Lyon in April and May, and after having to cancel everything in January, it was really good to be back at work!  FL

"Mais ce que l'on emportera à jamais dans ses souvenirs, c'est Felicity Lott dans La Voix humaine. Car une telle leçon de diction, de chant et de théâtre, cela fait partie des moments dont on est fier, plus tard, de dire : "J'y étais."" (Le Figaro)          

"Le rôle est chanté et vraiment joué par la très intense soprano Felicity Lott à la prononciation parfaite. Émouvante, légère, elle est aussi profondément femme blessée - sa voix aérienne devient alors aigus clairs sans stridence, et évoque le désespoir rentré, contenu." (Le Petit Bulletin Grenoble)

"Als Festival innerhalb der Saison schnürte man immerhin sechs Opern-Imbisse zu drei Abenden. Und bewies, dass der Gefühls-Reaktor Oper auch in Kurzzeit-Heizperioden zur Kernschmelze gelangt. Dann jedenfalls, wenn Felicity Lott "La Voix Humaine", Poulencs Eifersuchtsmonodram, im Stile von Prousts Madame Verdurin mit Lockenturm und Hundekörbchen zwitschert, wimmert und kreischt. Ein Portrait der Dame als Jammerläppchen: unwiderstehlich. Und endlich mal nicht auf den Stimmresten einer gewesenen Diva geknirscht, sondern mit vollen Rohr-Reserven ausgesungen und zur Explosion gebracht. Ein Meisterstück." (Die Welt)