Christian Gerhaher never left the stage.
He could be the title character in Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck.” But in Simon McBurney’s brutal, elegiac production at France’s Aix-en-Provence festival, Gerhaher was unmasked from the start: He wore his harrowing transformation, from hapless soldier to psychologically crushed killer, on his face throughout the 90 minutes. of the opera, as Wozzeck says, “one after the other.”
It was hard to watch, as this opera is supposed to be: Gerhaher, a baritone, is a commanding song singer with a learned attention to text and a chameleon-like ability to inhabit richly considered characters, if only for a few minutes. This remarkable skill, on the scale of opera and under the guise of McBurney’s stark, unremarkable staging, marks a high point in Gerhaher’s long, already acclaimed career.
With Simon Rattle leading a virtually flawless London Symphony Orchestra in the pit, this “Wozzeck” was one of those opera marvels: a harmonious encounter of singing, acting and direction at an impressively high level. It is the most beautiful presentation at this year’s edition of the Aix Festival, the 75th.
It’s both understandable and a little disappointing that the Festival’s most obvious success was also its most traditional production: McBurney’s “Wozzeck” could have come from any major opera house. But shows like this alone are not what make Aix a summer music destination.
No. The appeal also lies in the departure from tradition. Without them, Aix would be another Salzburg rather than Europe’s most interesting opera festival – although at this point in Pierre Audi’s tenure as Artistic Director ‘opera’ is too restrictive a label, with a slate over the past week of film, music theater , concerts and, yes, opera, including two new works, each of a vastly different character.
Many summer festivals exist primarily for the fun of making music outside of the usual concert halls and theaters. That’s part of Aix’s ethos, too, but what sets it apart from the others – aside from its bountiful 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, artistically (or with an audience) not everything worked out; some of what I saw was reckless, some of it abusive. But it was all worth discussing.
Provocative even at its lowest point, “Ballets Russes,” a concert triple bill of Stravinsky’s scores for the Ballets Russes—”The Firebird,” “Petrouchka,” and “The Rite of Spring”—accompanied three films and screened in the cavernous Stadium de Vitrolles, in the hills south of Aix. In the pit was the Orchester de Paris, so to speak, under the direction of its music director, Klaus Mäkelä.
The movies were different: Rebecca Zlotowski’s reshoot of her 2016 movie ‘Planetarium’ for ‘Firebird’; an elaborate fashion ad of questionable sexual politics by Bertrand Mandico for “Petrouchka”; and a take on the “Rite,” by Evangelia Kranioti, which treated the brutality of the music so literally and insipidly that it included native Brazilian imagery, drug use among queer homeless youth, and bloody violence against a transgender person.
I found my eye wandering from the screen to the orchestra, so richly scored and physical are these ballets from a red-hot moment in Stravinsky’s career. But that, too, turned out to be disturbing. Mäkelä’s objective approach is uncompromising, but really pays off when he directs top performers, such as those of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – less the New York Philharmonic, where he made his debut last December, and, for the purposes of this festival, the Orchestra of Paris.
What Mäkelä elicited from the Parisians was cleaner and punchier than on their recording of “Firebird” and the “Rite” earlier this year. But it was still marred by things like a confused Infernal Dance and an overly cautious bassoon solo at the beginning of the ‘Rite’. Struggling to clearly define its episodic style, the “Petrouchka” flattened the layers of unsettling counterpoint as if brushing over it in one go.
Also uneven, but largely more coherent, was Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging of ‘Così Fan Tutte’, the festival’s annual Mozart production, at the open-air Théâtre de l’Archevêché. Tcherniakov’s adaptation of the opera was “Così” through Ingmar Bergman and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, replacing the typically young lovers with older ones who had to rekindle their love through experimental therapy and role-playing.
Mozart’s score of clear, deft vocal writing is not easy for older singers, so Tcherniakov’s concept inevitably prioritized itself over the music. However, the cast handled it with courage – especially soprano Agneta Eichenholz as Fiordiligi, who performed the punishingly long ‘Per pietà’ during the onset of sudden rain. But the vocal shortcomings of the singers were also unfairly exposed, and they were unreliably supported by Thomas Hengelbrock’s inconsistent baton leading his Balthasar Neumann Orchestra.
Most comfortable was the soprano Nicole Chevalier as Despina, here married to Don Alfonso; together they run a resort or couple’s retreat and derive pleasure from manipulating the sex lives of others. Tcherniakov seemed to be working towards an end to renewed sexual appetites. But the finale turned violent – an undeserved non-sequitur – and turned the set’s luxury resort into the scene of a shocking snuff movie.
The director Thomas Ostermeier, of the Schaubühne in Berlin, had more control over his production: Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann’s “The Threepenny Opera”, in a refreshingly corrective new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. Musically, it featured a newly inserted number, “Pauv’ Madam Peachum”, written in the late 1930s for a French revival, and a slightly modified orchestration by Maxime Pascal, who vigorously conducted his ensemble Le Balcon in the pit of the Archevêché.
But Ostermeier seemed to have such control over the material, with such a strict treatment of the text, that it came across as mannered. For all its grit and modern appeal, this “Threepenny” performed by the company of the Comédie-Française was ultimately conventional. A director must know exactly what to say with the piece; everything else is, as here, laborious recitation.
A much more satisfying portrait of Weill could be found in the courtyard of the Hôtel Maynier d’Oppède, where pianist Kirill Gerstein, the festival’s artist in residence, performed songs by Weill and Hanns Eisler with HK Gruber, the composer, conductor and perhaps the greatest living interpreter of this style. Their “Threepenny” selections, in particular, showed how best to balance the piece’s catchy melodies and bitter lyrics: Gerstein’s exuberant play and dance, Gruber’s semi-Sprechstimme growl, with viciously rolling R’s on lines like “Beefsteak tartar’.
Concerts proved as satisfying as any staged production during Aix’s opening week: Gerstein and members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, for instance, performed a chamber arrangement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, or his delightful montage of a rarely seen Zemlinsky pantomime, ‘Ein Lichtstrahl’. And at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud, the soprano Asmik Grigorian gave a characteristically powerful and dramatically considered recital of songs by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff with pianist Lukas Genusias.
And then there was “Wozzeck.” Gerhaher was not alone in his triumph; to name just one colleague, the soprano Malin Byström, as Marie radiated despair and sympathy. And Rattle propelled the score with transparent detail and, in the final instrumental interlude, crushing Mahlerian pathos and grandeur.
At that moment I was reminded of artist William Kentridge’s “Wozzeck” production, the production 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 fills the stage with towering, obvious and distracting war imagery that exaggerates the effect.
At the Grand Théâtre de Provence, McBurney had the bare walls of his set close by, creating a spare, shallow stage and letting the music speak for itself as a spotlight shone on Wozzeck and Marie’s newly orphaned child. It was one of the show’s many haunting images.
Elsewhere, McBurney’s production could easily be taken for granted if not closely scrutinized: purely minimal, yet technologically advanced and led by the choreographer Leah Hausman – who moves multitudes of performers so smoothly that she can conjure up a bar scene or transform it with magic. brevity can make disappear .
It was during a week in Aix that I saw “Wozzeck” for the last time, and I’m glad the schedule worked out this way. Experimentation had been worth it in its way, but McBurney’s staging was proof of opera’s undying ability to move, shatter, and shock on its own. Fortunately, the festival makes way for both.
