Every summer, opera moves from the city to the country. Stars pack their bags for idyllic destinations, and their most dedicated, deep-pocketed fans follow.
It’s festival season, and perhaps the most interesting one is in Aix-en-Provence, France. At the Aix Festival, directors take risks on classics, and new works are unveiled in spots as old-fashioned as a Baroque theater and as unlikely as a monolithic stadium off the highway. Audience members come from around the world, often laid back in linens and sandals, expecting an operatic adventure worth traveling for.
This year’s Aix Festival, which continues through July 21, has been somberly tinted by the death of its general director, Pierre Audi, in early May. He had commissioned two productions that premiered during the opening weekend: an intimate, charged reimagining of Britten’s “Billy Budd” by the director Ted Huffman and the composer Oliver Leith; and the world premiere of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a long but frequently beautiful collaboration among the composer Sivan Eldar, the director Peter Sellars, the artist Julie Mehretu and the author Lauren Groff.
It’s too soon to know whether those shows will travel and take root. But other festival productions already have plans to be broadcast and streamed online, or even to be revived at other opera houses. Below are ways to experience them for yourself. (Some media may be restricted in certain countries.)
‘Don Giovanni’
The festival opened on July 4 with a new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” directed by Robert Icke in his opera debut and conducted by Simon Rattle, leading the lush Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Icke is known for his intelligent, liberal adaptations of theater classics, and he was similarly bold, if sometimes overflowing with ideas, in taking on one of the most difficult operas in the canon.
His conceit is based on Leporello’s passing question “Who’s dead, you or the old man?” after Giovanni kills the Commendatore. There is no difference between the men in Icke’s production: They are depicted as the same person, at different ages, and the opera’s surreal drama unfolds as a delirious life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment after the “old man” has a heart attack.
Along the way we learn that Giovanni’s precipitating crime was the sexual assault of his daughter, based on the darkest lines of Leporello’s Catalog Aria. Trauma ripples out in all directions, and over time wickedness takes a physical toll on Giovanni (a towering yet sympathetic Andrè Schuen). In a generally strong cast, the soprano Golda Schultz stood out as an eloquent and assured Donna Anna.
How to watch or listen: Broadcast on France Musique on July 12.
‘Louise’
Great festivals often use their sense of occasion to revive works that rarely get programmed. That was the case with the Aix production of Charpentier’s “Louise,” which premiered in 1900. Relatively popular for the first half of the 20th century, it later became remembered mainly for the aria “Depuis le jour.”
The director Christof Loy presented this “musical novel,” inspired by the naturalist style of Émile Zola, in a hyper-realistic hospital waiting room, but with a touch of surrealism: He fills it with costumes and props to suggest a home or workshop, or even the busy streets of Montmartre. But as the evening went on (and on), it became clear that the opera doesn’t really need to be heard again soon.
Charpentier’s libretto is too long for the story, and his score, in the perfumed, surface-deep sound of late-19th-century Paris, is overly luxuriant. He also challenges the two lead singers with vocal writing better fit for Wagnerians. The soprano Elsa Dreisig, as Louise, and the tenor Adam Smith, as her lover, Julien, struggled through duets that require the lungs for “Tristan und Isolde.”
How to watch or listen: Streaming on Arte on July 12, and broadcast on France Musique on July 14. Revivals are planned for theaters including the Opéra National de Lyon and the Opéra Comique in Paris.
‘La Calisto’
The finest production of the festival was the last to open: Cavalli’s “La Calisto,” directed by Jetske Mijnssen, who transported this 1651 telling of the Callisto myth to ancien régime France with the wicked spirit of “Dangerous Liaisons.”
It made for a virtually seamless evening of opera, with an excellent 10-person cast and lively playing in the pit by Ensemble Correspondances and Sébastien Daucé. But the work itself is something of a scene stealer, neglected for three centuries before a modern resurgence that began in 1970. The libretto is by turns poetic and comically raunchy, while the score is rich with dramatic force and riveting beauty.
Above all the opera is shockingly modern and casually Sapphic, offering a lesson about hierarchy and control that Mijnssen’s staging makes clear: You can always count on bored people in power to get up to no good.
How to watch or listen: Broadcast on France Musique on July 13. Revivals are planned for theaters including Opéra de Rennes, Angers Nantes Opéra, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Théâtre de Caen, Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and Opéra Grand Avignon.
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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