AIX-EN-PROVENCE.- Christian Gerhaher never left the stage.
He could have, as the title character in Alban Bergs Wozzeck. But in Simon McBurneys brutal, elegiac production at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, Gerhaher was exposed from the start: He wore his harrowing transformation, from hapless soldier to psychologically crushed murderer, on his face for the operas 90 minutes of, as Wozzeck says, one thing after another.
It was hard to watch, as this opera should be: Gerhaher, a baritone, is a reigning lieder singer with a scholarly attention to text and a chameleonic ability to inhabit richly considered characters, even for just a few minutes. This remarkable skill, on the scale of opera and under the care of McBurneys stark, unshowy staging, makes for a high point of Gerhahers long, much-lauded career.
With Simon Rattle leading a virtually unimpeachable London Symphony Orchestra in the pit, this Wozzeck was one of those operatic miracles: a harmonious meeting of singing, playing and direction at an impressively high level. It is the finest presentation at this years edition of the Aix Festival, the 75th.
Its both understandable, and a touch disappointing, that the festivals clearest success was also the most traditional production: McBurneys Wozzeck could have come from any major opera house. But this type of show alone is not what makes Aix a summer music destination.
No. Its draw is also in the departures from tradition. Without them, Aix would be another Salzburg instead of the most interesting opera festival in Europe though at this point in Pierre Audis tenure as artistic director, opera is too limiting a label, with a slate over the past week of film, music theater, concerts and, yes, opera, including two new works, each of vastly different character.
Many summer festivals exist primarily for the pleasure of music-making beyond the usual concert halls and theaters. Thats part of the ethos of Aix, too, but what differentiates it from the others aside from its abundant rosé and laid-back, linen-forward dress code is that it seemingly asks at every turn: What else can we do here?
Big swings are taken every year. In this edition, not everything succeeded artistically (or with audiences); some of what I saw was reckless, some of it offensive. But it was all worth discussing.
There was provocation even at the low point, Ballets Russes, a concert triple bill of Stravinskys scores for the Ballets Russes The Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring accompanied by three films and screened in the cavernous Stadium de Vitrolles, in the hills south of Aix. In the pit, so to speak, was the Orchestre de Paris under the baton of its music director, Klaus Mäkelä.
The films were distinct: Rebecca Zlotowskis recut of her 2016 movie Planetarium for Firebird; an extended fashion ad of questionable sexual politics by Bertrand Mandico for Petrouchka; and a take on the Rite, by Evangelia Kranioti, that treated the musics savagery so literally and tastelessly that it included Indigenous Brazilian imagery, drug usage among queer homeless youth and bloody violence against a transgender person.
I found my eye drifting from the screen to the orchestra, so richly scored and physical are these ballets from a white-hot moment of Stravinskys career. But that, too, proved troubling. Mäkeläs objective approach insists on little yet actually pays off when he is leading top-tier players, such as those of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra less so the New York Philharmonic, where he debuted last December, and, for the purposes of this festival, the Orchestre de Paris.
What Mäkelä elicited from the Parisians was cleaner and more decisive than on their recording of Firebird and the Rite this year. But it was still marred by a muddled Infernal Dance, for example, and an overly tentative bassoon solo at the start of the Rite. The Petrouchka struggled to define its episodic style clearly, and flattened its layers of unsettling counterpoint as if polishing over them in one stroke.
Also uneven, but largely more coherent, was Dmitri Tcherniakovs staging of Così Fan Tutte, the festivals annual Mozart production, at the outdoor Théâtre de lArchevêché. Tcherniakovs treatment of the opera was Così by way of Ingmar Bergman and Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, replacing the typically young lovers with older ones in need of rekindling their love through experimental therapy and role play.
Mozarts score of bright, agile vocal writing isnt easy for aging singers, so Tcherniakovs concept inevitably prioritized itself over the music. The cast, though, handled it courageously particularly soprano Agneta Eichenholz as Fiordiligi, who performed the punishingly long Per pietà through the start of sudden rainfall. But the singers vocal shortcomings were also unfairly exposed, and they were unreliably supported by Thomas Hengelbrocks inconsistent baton leading his Balthasar Neumann Orchestra.
Most at ease was the soprano Nicole Chevalier as Despina, here married to Don Alfonso; together, they run a resort or a couples retreat and get pleasure from manipulating the sex lives of others. Tcherniakov seemed to be building toward an ending of renewed sexual appetites. But the finale turned violent an unearned non sequitur flipping the sets upscale resort into the scene of a shocking snuff film.
Director Thomas Ostermeier, of the Schaubühne in Berlin, had more control over his production: Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmanns The Threepenny Opera, in a refreshingly corrective new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. Musically, it featured a newly inserted song, Pauv Madam Peachum, written in the late 1930s for a French revival, and a slightly altered orchestration by Maxime Pascal, who vigorously conducted his ensemble Le Balcon in the pit at the Archevêché.
But Ostermeier appeared to have so much control over the material, with such a by-the-book treatment of the text, that it came off as mannered. For all its grit and modern look, this Threepenny, performed by the company of the Comédie-Française, was ultimately conventional. A director must know exactly what to say with the piece; anything else is bound, as here, to be a slog of a recitation.
A far more rewarding portrait of Weill could be found at the courtyard of the Hôtel Maynier dOppède, where pianist Kirill Gerstein, the festivals artist in residence, performed songs by Weill and Hanns Eisler with HK Gruber, the composer, conductor and arguably greatest living interpreter of this style. Their Threepenny selections in particular demonstrated how best to balance the pieces infectious melodies and bitter texts: Gersteins playing buoyant and dancing, Grubers semi-Sprechstimme snarling, with wickedly rolling Rs on phrases like Beefsteak Tartar.
Concerts proved as satisfying as any staged production during Aixs opening week: Gerstein and members of the Berlin Philharmonic performing a chamber arrangement of Mahlers Fourth Symphony, for example, or his delightful mounting of a rarely seen Zemlinsky pantomime, Ein Lichtstrahl. And at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud, soprano Asmik Grigorian gave a characteristically mighty and dramatically considered recital of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff songs with the pianist Lukas Genusias.
Premieres at Aix can be a mixed bag, but this year Picture a Day Like This, by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, and The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, by Philip Venables and Ted Huffman, were rightfully well-received contributions to the field: often surprising, executed with mastery and worth repeated viewing as they travel in the coming months and years. (Both were reviewed in The New York Times last weekend.)
And then there was Wozzeck. Gerhaher wasnt alone in his triumph; to name just one colleague, soprano Malin Byström, as Marie, exuded desperation and sympathy. And Rattle propelled the score with transparent details and, in the final instrumental interlude, crushing Mahlerian pathos and grandeur.
During that moment, I was reminded of artist William Kentridges Wozzeck production, the one most recently presented at the leading opera houses in France, at the Paris Opera, and in the United States, at the Metropolitan Opera. At that orchestral climax, Kentridge crowds the stage with towering, obvious and distracting war imagery that overstates the effect.
At the Grand Théâtre de Provence, McBurney had the bare walls of his set simply close in, creating a spare, shallow stage and letting the music speak for itself while a spotlight shone on the newly orphaned child of Wozzeck and Marie. It was one of the shows many haunting images.
Elsewhere, McBurneys production could be easily taken for granted if not examined closely: cleanly minimal, yet technologically sophisticated and guided by the choreographer Leah Hausman who moves masses of performers so smoothly, she can conjure a bar scene or make it vanish with magical brevity.
During a week at Aix, I saw Wozzeck last, and Im glad that was how the schedule worked out. Experimentation had been worthwhile in its way, but McBurneys staging was evidence of operas undying ability to move, shatter and shock on its own. Thankfully, the festival makes room for both.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.