{"id":18737,"date":"2021-07-13T13:17:28","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T10:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/2021\/07\/a-festival-has-a-monumental-premiere-and-some-other-operas-too\/"},"modified":"2021-08-24T13:44:35","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T10:44:35","slug":"a-festival-has-a-monumental-premiere-and-some-other-operas-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/2021\/07\/a-festival-has-a-monumental-premiere-and-some-other-operas-too\/","title":{"rendered":"A Festival Has a Monumental Premiere (and Some Other Operas, Too)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France \u2014 I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer\u2019s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho\u2019s \u201cInnocence,\u201d which premiered here on July 3.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution\u2019s most difficult task. This is an art form so stubbornly lodged in the past that it always feels like a miracle when a \u201ccr\u00e9ation,\u201d as the French call it, succeeds.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">And \u201cInnocence,\u201d which explores the aftermath of a deadly school shooting, does more than succeed. With riveting clarity and enigmatic shadows, and through a range of languages in different registers of speaking and singing, it captures both the promise and darkness of cosmopolitanism itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">It is a victory for Saariaho and her collaborators, and for the Aix Festival and Pierre Audi, its director since 2018. He managed to hold rehearsals with just a piano last summer, when all festival performances were canceled because of the pandemic, and to shift the premiere seamlessly to this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">\u201cI have a long career in commissioning,\u201d Audi told The Times recently. \u201cAnd this is one of the five greatest pieces that I\u2019ve ever been involved with.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">It is hard for even the most beloved works in the repertory, some of which are on offer at Aix through July 25, to measure up to that. It felt symbolic that a moment that was devastating in \u201cInnocence\u201d \u2014 a character crushing a handful of cake onto another \u2014 returned as a silly, passing bit of slapstick the following evening in Mozart\u2019s \u201cLe Nozze di Figaro.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Lotte de Beer\u2019s \u201cFigaro\u201d production is an intentional, endearing mess \u2014 an eclectic, attention-deficit explosion practically vibrating through different aesthetics, as though on a candy high. The overture is staged as traditional, raucous commedia dell\u2019arte; the first act is a raunchy multi-cam sitcom, on a set that gradually (and literally) collapses into a demented carnival amid the confusions of the Act II finale, complete with human-height penises strolling around.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">After intermission, though, the curtain rises on almost nothing \u2014 a bed inside a cube defined by white neon bars \u2014 and the acting is equally restrained and gloomy. Then the fourth and final act enacts a kind of utopian, queer-feminist knitting collective led by a minor character, Marcellina, the cast draped in garments of Day-Glo yarn. Out of the bed, which has come to be the site of male authority and adultery, an enormous, inflatable fairy-tale tree slowly grows.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Thomas Hengelbrock led the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble in a crisp but sensuously phrased reading of the score. Lea Desandre was a bright, alert Cherubino; Jacquelyn Wagner, a Countess cooler than the norm.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">In the title role of Barrie Kosky\u2019s staging of Verdi\u2019s \u201cFalstaff,\u201d Christopher Purves was also different than the norm, at least at the start. In the first scene, Purves\u2019s Falstaff is shown not as the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit, but as a careful master chef, sensitively relishing his creations \u2014 and with, at best, a dad bod.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">While Falstaff is often likable, Kosky\u2019s implicit promise is that we\u2019ll admire him, too. This never quite happens, as the production settles into a more well-worn groove, abounding in this director\u2019s trademark vaudevillian touches: men pulling off wigs and dancing in skirts, the works. The title character\u2019s seductions are barely more sophisticated than in a thousand \u201cFalstaff\u201d productions; the merry wives of Windsor\u2019s revenge, little crueler.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">The conductor, Daniele Rustioni, led the orchestra of the Lyon Opera with a pacing that was genial but less than diamond-precise. The voices, including that of the game, hard-working Purves, were a touch too small for the roles. The test of a \u201cFalstaff\u201d is the effect of the great final ensemble fugue; here the sequence was pleasant rather than cathartic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">There was musical catharsis to spare in Wagner\u2019s \u201cTristan und Isolde,\u201d with a supreme cast and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted with lithe flexibility by Simon Rattle. But Simon Stone\u2019s staging \u2014 an almost comically realistic evocation of contemporary Paris, from a high-rise apartment to a M\u00e9tro car \u2014 is perplexing, as it purports to explain the brunt of the plot as a woman\u2019s fantasies after learning her husband is cheating.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Perhaps intentionally, but still frustratingly, the production\u2019s line between reality and fantasy keeps getting blurrier, until it\u2019s hard to know who\u2019s really betraying whom, who\u2019s getting stabbed and who survives. But if Nina Stemme\u2019s voice has lost a touch of sumptuousness, she\u2019s never been better as Isolde \u2014 singing fearlessly, and ardently invested in the production. Stuart Skelton\u00a0<em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">sings<\/em>\u00a0rather than barks Tristan, a tenor\u2019s Everest, and Franz-Josef Selig is a commandingly melancholy Marke.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Aix has long been notable for placing smaller pieces, including new ones, amid canonical titans and grand-scale premieres like \u201cInnocence.\u201d In an enormous former ironworks at Luma \u2014 the new art complex in Arles, about 50 miles from Aix \u2014 \u201cThe Arab Apocalypse\u201d was created as part of the festival\u2019s heartening commitment to connecting southern France and the greater Mediterranean world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">But based on Etel Adnan\u2019s direly expressionistic poems about the Lebanese civil war, with music by Samir Odeh-Tamimi and a sketched staging-in-the-round by Audi, \u201cApocalypse\u201d was dreary \u2014 the score alternating between shivering and pummeling, the action busy but bland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">\u201cCombattimento: The Black Swan Theory\u201d was a grab-bag of early Baroque Italian music, with rich helpings of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Luigi Rossi and more. Silvia Costa tried to corral this gorgeous material into a kind of stylized pageant, a loose trajectory of war, mourning, society-building, more war, more building.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Her images were more mystifying than evocative. But the performance, led by S\u00e9bastien Dauc\u00e9, was musically exquisite, with eight superb young singers ideally blending purity and passion, and 13 members of Ensemble Correspondances filling the jewel-box Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Jeu de Paume with the visceral force of a symphony orchestra.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Audi\u2019s ambitions are to expand Aix, implicitly taking on the Salzburg Festival in Austria, which opens at the end of July, and is classical music\u2019s most storied summer event. (While Salzburg is redoubtable, the mood, clothing and ticket prices in Aix are significantly more relaxed.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">The program of concerts \u2014 which, in Aix, has long been an afterthought to opera, but is a Salzburg powerhouse \u2014 will grow, as will the scope of the festival\u2019s productions. With \u201cTosca,\u201d Aix\u2019s first Puccini, in 2019, it declared that it could cover the red-meat Italian hits. In addition to Luma, Audi has his sights on other unconventional spaces in the region.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">Commissions are also central to his agenda; \u201cInnocence\u201d is resounding proof. Seeing it a second time, on Saturday, confirmed the initial impression of its intensity and restraint, its emotional pull and intellectual power.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">The production \u2014 like \u201cTristan,\u201d directed by Stone \u2014 keenly depicts both the shocking reality of the central tragedy and its surreal reverberations, which carry years into the future. I question only one directorial intervention: The shooter, a student at the school, is eventually shown onstage, played by a silent actor, even though he is not in the libretto.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">This dilutes the mystery of the piece, in which all the characters revolve around, and run from, a figure who is absent, a kind of god against whom everyone\u2019s innocence (and culpability) is measured. When he appears in the flesh, the opera\u2019s impact wavers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-axufdj evys1bk0\">But only slightly. This is a quibble with a staging that, in general precisely, aligns with an elegant yet savage work. While recalling the starkness of Greek tragedy, \u201cInnocence\u201d is also among the first operatic barometers of our globalized age\u2019s travails.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France \u2014 I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer\u2019s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho\u2019s \u201cInnocence,\u201d which premiered here on July 3. Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution\u2019s most difficult task. This is an art [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efk.epcc.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}