Festival Aix-en-Provence – culture – SZ.de

The international festival for lyrical art in Aix-en-Provence can easily be imagined as the French Salzburg Festival, only more contemplative, more human, less snobby. In addition to classical concert events, the main focus is on new opera productions. The game is played in the courtyard of the archdiocesan administration, which was built in 2007 Grand Theater de Provence, recently also in a black concrete cube outside the city. It is the former home of the bankrupt handball club. This year’s festival was opened there.

Of the ingenious theater maker Romeo Castellucci staged something that actually cannot be staged: Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection Symphony” – corresponding to the title of the evening: “Résurrection”. Castellucci radically questioned this without denying it. While the composer Gustav Mahler had in mind the pious funeral ceremony for his fellow conductor Hans von Bülow, Castellucci unfolded a gloomy, perpetual war scenario, or rather: what remains of it. The outwardly unspectacular, but psychologically the most far-reaching that takes place between war and resurrection. In this huge, black, windowless, gloomy concrete room with its breakneck, steep grandstand, you first look into nothing.

On the ground, flat mounds of earthy sand: One remembers a production of Carmen by Peter Brook in the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich, which managed with much less sand for the entire opera. But this time it’s about more. Birds are singing, a small white horse trots in, sniffs the sand, goes on, sniffs again, stays like that for a long time. You have no idea what the horse smelled. A dark viola-cello-tremolo sets in, more and more people enter the scene and put on white protective suits. Yes, it’s a crime scene. It takes a long time to dig meticulously, but then it happens in quick succession. Corpses are dug out of the ground, placed on white body bags. Until most of the stage area is covered with corpses.

Not much else happens on the outside, but the tenaciously dragging action doesn’t let you go, the tableau vivant, which develops in minimal steps, develops great suggestive power. So much so that now the music, this tremendous death symphony, underscores the visuals and not the other way around. Maybe it only works that way if you’re staging something that doesn’t actually need this added value: that the direction subordinates itself to the music so as not to appear superfluous. For the symphony, the Orchester de Paris including the choir and the singers Golda Schultz and Marianne Crebassa under the direction of Esa Pekka Salonen implemented effectively within the framework of the acoustic peculiarities, it is a defeat. A restriction of the fields of association, a paternalism of interpretations and feelings. But maybe not the thought processes. Unlike the dance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, this is not about pure visual aesthetics, but about a somewhat more subtle and all the more effective theatrical method.

Herod, who has always sexually lusted after his stepdaughter, dreams up this dance

Even more impressive was the new production of Richard Strauss’ opera “Salome”, which was also not exactly cheerful, based on the drama by Oscar Wilde, which was indicative at the time. Director Andrea Breth has approached the tragic heroine from the Old Testament with empathy and insight. Ingo Metzmacher conducted the Orchester de Paris quickly through the difficult score, the excellent vocal ensemble convinced and inspired, above all Elsa Dreisig as the powerful-voiced Salome, Gábor Bretz as Jochanaan, Angela Denoke as Herodias, Joel Prieto as Narraboth and John Daszak as Herodes. It’s striking from the get-go how scrupulous Breth is about it. When Salome bluntly declares to the imprisoned prophet Jochanaan, “I am in love with your body,” what follows is precisely how she approaches it, how close she comes to it. This is very finely balanced and reveals a seriousness and precision in the direction of the characters that one does not experience every day in the opera.

And as far as the legendary veil dance is concerned, the erotic climax, which one always expects with very mixed feelings – because hardly any singer wants to be doubled here – Breth found a convincing solution here: Herod, who has always sexually desired his stepdaughter, dreams himself this dance, and instead of a young princess unveiling her veil while dancing, the audience only sees distant women in pale negligés wandering through the gloomy stage landscape. Breth’s scenic anticipations are often subtle, sometimes very direct, a kind of fade-in. The prophet appears at the table with his head sticking out through an opening in the table, as if it were already lying on the silver platter on which Salome will challenge him at the end. With her dance in the veil, she had persuaded Herod to fulfill her cruel wish.

Open detailed view

So that this doesn’t just remain a draconian act of revenge by a rejected woman, Breth shows, as already laid out in Wilde’s text and also understandable in Strauss’s music, the despair of the rejected woman, who simply does not understand how the unwashed rascal in the dungeon of her libidinal power and possibly the option of freedom. In the end, this almost inhuman, total surrender to oneself is palpable. All that remains of the gleaming silver platter of triumph is a blood-smeared zinc tub, and instead of crouching in the state hall of the palace, Salome cowers in the shabby slaughter kitchen. A lasting image of misfortune. You almost forget it’s your own fault.

Where the highly virtuosic historical art of singing has disappeared, the entire opera is lost

Satoshi Miyagi’s static staging of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s first major opera “Idomeneo” was less edifying, indeed lengthy. That became clear after about an hour and a half at the latest, shortly before midnight at this open-air event, and you could either fall asleep or flee. The latter was recommended. This dramma per musica in the baroque seria tradition forms the musical prelude to Mozart’s main works of music theater, which in turn ends with a seria after the opere buffe, which have been successful to this day. Unfortunately, Raphaël Pichon and his ensemble “Pygmalion”, who have long attracted attention with great new Mozart interpretations, could not win this evening.

Open detailed view

A mediocre ensemble of soloists, who celebrated the arias – which were now felt to be much too long – more or less convincingly, not only geographically motionless, usually less, revealed the problem. Where the highly virtuosic historical art of singing has disappeared, the entire opera has also disappeared. And if nothing is designed apart from the cubist showcases put together to rotate, let alone directing the characters, then even a sterile, artificial opera seria cannot be presented in a meaningful way. Especially not when it comes from Mozart and, through art, always means the concretely human. A bit of a shame, because in Aix-en-Provence in particular, great importance has been attached to Mozart’s operas since the festival was founded.