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    This Soprano Sings ‘the Sound of the Soul’

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    “Un bel dì,” the title character’s great aria in “Madama Butterfly,” begins with the soprano singing a hovering G flat. Puccini writes in the score that the note is to emerge not just pianissimo, or very soft, but also “come da lontano”: as if coming from far away.The opera is about a young Japanese woman convinced that the American naval officer who abandoned her will return, and “Un bel dì” narrates her fantasy of seeing his ship sailing back into the harbor at Nagasaki.At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, Ermonela Jaho condenses that desperate illusion into a haunting filament of tone. What’s more, she sings the note while lying on her back on the floor in this bracingly intimate new production of the beloved work.“The attack on the G flat, it’s like hope is being suspended in midair, it’s a sound like the ship appearing on the horizon,” Daniele Rustioni, who conducts the Lyon Opera Orchestra in the production, said in an interview. “And Ermonela does it. You wait for that moment and she delivers.”Jaho, left, and the tenor Adam Smith, as Pinkteron.Ruth WalzJaho, who turns 50 on July 18, delivers these time-stopping threads of sound again and again at moments like Butterfly’s ethereal entrance, marked even softer than pianissimo; during her love duet with Pinkerton, the callous American officer, when she says that the stars are like eyes, gazing at them; and later, when she insists that when Pinkerton returns, their son’s name will change from Sorrow to Joy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Composer Who Changed Opera With ‘a Beautiful Simplicity’

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      In the mid-1700s, Christoph Willibald Gluck overthrew the musical excesses around him. A marathon double bill in France shows the vibrancy of his vision.A young woman is offered as a sacrifice to save her people before being rescued by divine intervention. Then a war is fought. Years pass, and, now living some 2,000 miles away, the same woman receives an agonizing order to perform a sacrifice herself, another bloody gift to the gods.That is a summary of two operas, both by Christoph Willibald Gluck: “Iphigénie en Aulide” and “Iphigénie en Tauride.” They were written five years apart and were never intended to be performed together. Each is a full-length score of about two hours, and while they share a protagonist, the vocal range for the character isn’t quite the same in both.But their plots — which tell the story of Greek myth’s Iphigenia, first in Aulis as a would-be victim, then in Tauris as a would-be murderer — flow together with uncanny ease. And on Wednesday, the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France opened a production that pairs the works in a marathon double bill, directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov as a brooding reflection on the numbness of endless conflict.Tcherniakov sets the two operas in a stage-filling, prisonlike skeleton of a house, with “Aulide” as the last gasp of a frivolous prewar elite. His “Tauride” depicts the somber aftermath of years of brutal battles, and the physical and emotional toll — the paranoia, the twisted fantasies — on those who remain.Today, Gluck suffers a little from a reputation for formality, even stodginess. But with the period instrument ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée conducted gracefully yet energetically by Emmanuelle Haïm, the Aix double bill was a reminder of the vibrancy of his vision, a majestic yet vigorous directness.This rare juxtaposition offers an immersion in Gluck’s revolutionary innovations — what became known as his reform of opera, paving the way for Wagner and modernity. By the middle of the 18th century, bloated extravagance was the mainstream of Italian opera, dominated by singers burbling mindless coloratura in an endless parade of arias that barely held together as narrative.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Conductor Who Wants to Put You ‘Inside the Sound’

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      Maxime Pascal, a latecomer to classical music, forged an unusual path to the podium that has paid off for him and for audiences.Growing up, the conductor Maxime Pascal was a self-identified musical dilettante.As a child in the south of France, he had some skill on the violin, and sat in on the piano lessons his mother taught. At night, he watched his father play New Orleans jazz. But he didn’t really listen to classical music until he was 18.Now, though, Pascal, 37, is arguably his generation’s finest conductor of 20th-century music, as well as an essential interpreter of contemporary works. And his schedule reflects both the breadth of his ambition and the respect he has garnered on some of the industry’s most prestigious stages.He is “a fascinating artist who understands the times we live in and the role music theater can have on injecting new life in opera,” said Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. Pascal spent July at the festival leading his ensemble, Le Balcon, and performers from the Comédie-Française in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera,” in a slightly altered though polarizing orchestration of his own design.This month, Pascal is at the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic for the Martinu rarity “The Greek Passion” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. And in November, in Paris, Pascal and Le Balcon will continue what he said has become his “life’s work” as they mount “Sonntag aus Licht,” their fifth installment in Stockhausen’s immense, seven-opera, 29-hour “Licht” — with an eye toward staging the entire cycle during the composer’s centennial year in 2028.Through it all, Pascal has emerged not only as a conductor of specialized repertoire, but also as a fundamentally persuasive musical communicator. His gestures can seem excessively physical; he takes his bows looking as if he had just fallen into a pool. Yet they don’t have the performative drama of, say, Leonard Bernstein.Pascal was a late bloomer, musically, but has been catching up with his colleagues, and in many cases surpassing them.Fredrik Broden for The New York Times“The audience understands immediately if a gesture is honest or if it’s fake,” said Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, who has made Pascal a regular guest there. “More interesting is honesty. That’s Maxime. In his gesture you get an immediate understanding of what’s going on.”If there’s an honesty to Pascal’s podium manner, it was cultivated unconsciously during his childhood. In retrospect, he said in an interview between performances of “Threepenny” last month, his entire upbringing and musical education funneled into his understanding of conducting today.He was born in Carcassonne, between Toulouse and Montpelier. Even if he wasn’t immersed in classical music, he was surrounded by sound sensations, he said, that he still feels. There was the brassy timbre of his father’s trombone, whether playing onstage or along with concerts on television. The first film he saw in theaters was “Aladdin,” and he was overwhelmed by being engulfed in the vivid images and songs.There was also the first time Pascal played in an orchestra, an experience that was practically epiphanic. “You realize you are part of a very high-level process that has existed since a very long time,” he said. “Musically, of course, and artistically, but also socially. If you want to know what the other child over there is playing, you have to listen. It’s something really strong.”So, when the time came to pick a path for his education, Pascal chose music, eventually making his way to the Paris Conservatory. Quickly realizing how much of a comparative head start his fellow students had, he devoted himself to catching up. From the media library he would check out six recordings a day, following no real agenda. “I discovered everything at the same time,” he said: the standard repertoire alongside the works of Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey and Pierre Boulez.Pascal has a similar headlong approach today. He and Le Balcon don’t repeat programs, so he is constantly learning new scores. In a sense, he has never stopped catching up. “Doing that,” he said, “you will keep a child’s curiosity forever. You will be marveling at small details until the end of your life.”As he attended shows, he wasn’t always satisfied with what he heard. At his first live experience with Boulez’s “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” he was so affected and stunned, he could barely applaud. But at some performances, he said, he felt “a bit too far from the sound and the work.” He wondered what would happen if he put on a concert that was entirely amplified.In 2008, with a small group of composers, a sound designer and volunteer musicians, Pascal put on a program of student works and Ravel songs performed by the soprano Julie Fuchs. When he heard the amplification — meticulously arranged and balanced — he snapped his fingers and said, “That’s it.”“I was no longer just watching and listening to something,” Pascal said. “I was inside the sound.” It felt like watching “Aladdin” all over again.They continued to put on performances, calling their ensemble Le Balcon, inspired by Genet’s play of the same name. The decision felt spontaneous at the time, Pascal said, but “we realized this text could be our manifesto. It talks about representation and what it means to incarnate.”Pascal and his ensemble, Le Balcon, constantly explore new repertoire. “The idea from the start,” he said, “was to always do something that would surprise us, to discover new things.”Fredrik Broden for The New York TimesAt the time, Pascal was familiar with Stockhausen’s music but didn’t yet know how similar the composer’s aims were to his, particularly in the completely amplified sound world of “Licht.” The cycle has been performed piecemeal over the years, especially as it was being written, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. But no company or artist had taken on the entire work before Le Balcon. (In 2019, Audi presented a three-day abridgment at the Holland Festival called “Aus Licht.”)Repeating the “Licht” operas in 2028 would be something of a first for Le Balcon. The ensemble constantly explores new repertoire, Pascal said, because “the idea from the start was to always do something that would surprise us, to discover new things.” Some of those moves have been driven by Audi and Hinterhäuser.Audi asked Pascal to conduct this summer’s “Threepenny” in part because of his talent with 20th-century works, but also because he is “always searching for an honest space for rethinking and reinvention.” Weill was new to Pascal, but, Audi said, “he plunged into it and emerged with a triumphant, refreshing and highly convincing result.” (A recording on the Alpha Classicals label is due for release in September.)In Salzburg, Pascal’s musical terrain has been vast: Debussy and Stravinsky, Grisey and Stockhausen, last year the large-scale “Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher” of Honegger and the harrowingly intimate “Jakub Lenz” of Wolfgang Rihm. “The Greek Passion” is his first appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic, a risky debut for any conductor. But, Hinterhäuser said, “the response is very beautiful” in rehearsals.Critics have received “Passion,” which opened on Sunday and continues through Aug. 27, well. Pascal was praised especially for his handling of the stylistically eclectic, unwieldy score. “Sometimes it sounds archaic, sometimes modern, sometimes lyrical, then again passionate,” Meret Forster wrote in BR Klassik. “That all these facets can be heard and understood in Salzburg is mainly because of Maxime Pascal.”If he has one detracting critic, it’s himself. Pascal said he has spent years learning to be happy with his performances. “For a long time, it was really, crazily bad,” he added. “It happens still: People are saying it was fantastic, the orchestra is applauding, but I think it was so bad.”Whether with Le Balcon or a new orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic, Pascal is striving to realize the ideal performance in his mind but also aiming for simple satisfaction. “It can be very difficult to accept, as an artist, that everything you will do is only a picture of what you are at that moment,” he said. “You may never reach what you are searching for, but you are always approaching it.” More

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      At the Aix Festival, Premieres in Pursuit of Happiness

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      Two works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, by two inventive opera partnerships, use fables to explore grief and queer utopian dreams.Happiness doesn’t come quickly. Aristotle claimed that as one swallow does not make spring, neither does one good day make someone happy. That would take a lifetime, at least.Those measures — days, lifetimes, even generations — are put to the test in the pursuit of happiness in two new, fablelike works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France: George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Picture a Day Like This,” and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”Yet in either case, time doesn’t guarantee anyone’s success in reaching that elusive goal.In “Picture” — Benjamin and Crimp’s fourth opera, a taut one-act of masterly craft — the aim is to find the embodiment of happiness. The protagonist, a woman whose infant son has died, is told that if she cuts a button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt, her child will be brought back to life. She has until nightfall, and is equipped only with a sheet of paper listing whom to seek.Crimp’s text, characteristically mysterious and strange, both untethered from reality and peppered with the banality of daily life, is something of a return to the aesthetic his first collaboration with Benjamin, “Into the Little Hill,” a 2006 retelling of the Pied Piper legend. (They went on to create the well-traveled psychosexual thriller “Written on Skin,” as well as a similar follow-up, “Lessons in Love and Violence.”) Here, in what makes for a natural double bill with “Little Hill,” Crimp draws from folk tale, the Alexander Romance, Christianity and Buddhism for a synthesis not unlike Wagner’s grab-bag approach to mythology.The woman encounters several archetypal personalities on her quest, a journey redolent of the Little Prince among the planets, or Alice in Wonderland. There are a pair of lovers, an erstwhile artisan, a composer and a collector. In a series of scenes, subtly linked in Benjamin’s score but operating as discrete set pieces, these people present as happy but crumble at the slightest scrutiny or self-disclosure. Only Zabelle, a seeming mirror image of the woman, has the wisdom to offer her something more like contentment, and salvation.In Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma’s straightforward, intimate production at the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, each scene fluidly emerges from three walls that wrap around the stage. Marie La Rocca’s unintrusive costumes differentiate the characters, who are played by a small cast in multiple roles: the soprano Beate Mordal, nimbly lyrical as a lover and the composer; the elegant countertenor Cameron Shahbazi as the other lover, weaving darkly sensual lines, and the composer’s assistant; and the baritone John Brancy as the artisan and the collector.Crebassa, left, and the baritone John Brancy, a standout in “Picture a Day Like This.”Jean-Louis FernandezBrancy is given some of Benjamin’s most adventurous vocal writing in the piece, and rises to it with impressive skill — seamless passaggio between the richly resonant depths of his range and a weightless, dreamy falsetto, about three and a half octaves from a low B flat to a soprano E.Special care appears to have been given, as well, to the soprano Anna Prohaska as Zabelle, her sympathetic stage presence feeding Benjamin’s firm yet humane music for her, and vice versa. In Zabelle’s scene, what is described in the libretto as her garden is rendered in video projections by the artist Hicham Berrada that show a barren aquarium as it blooms with surreal, alien life alluringly lush and menacing.As the woman, the mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa is determined but aching, her resolute manner betrayed by tense vibrato or wide-eyed concern. It’s through her that Benjamin, who also conducted the excellent players of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the pit, ties together his episodic score. Her reading the sheet of paper is accompanied by a motif of muted trumpets and a trombone; tubular bells, quietly embedded in each scene’s climax, suggest a clock striking, and time running out.Her race against time, however, is less important in the end than the woman’s epiphanic encounter with Zabelle. Whether that leads to happiness is impossible to say in a day, and is as ambiguous as Benjamin’s music itself, which despite its immaculate construction is never obviously representational or tidily resolved.Collin Shay, at center singing into a loudspeaker, and other performers in the 15-person ensemble of Phillip Venables and Ted Huffman’s new show, seen here in its premiere at the Manchester International Festival in England a week before its opening at Aix.Tristram KentonAmbivalent, too, is Venables and Huffman’s show, “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” at the Pavillon Noir. This music theater adaptation of the cult classic Larry Mitchell book of the same name from 1977, with illustrations by Ned Asta, recasts queer history in mythic, utopian terms in opposition to the patriarchy, referred to as “the Men.” (Among the work’s co-commissioners is NYU Skirball in New York, where it will travel next year.) Whereas the ’70s fable ends with uncertainty, Venables and Huffman take the story even further, introducing a cautionary tale of assimilation and offering a vision for life after the revolutions that Mitchell said “will engulf us all.”The last collaboration between Venables, a composer, and Huffman, a writer and director, was the 2019 opera “Denis & Katya,” a chamber piece based on the true story of two Russian teenagers who a few years earlier had run away from home, hidden in a cabin and died in a shootout with police. Barely more than an hour long, yet smoothly layered and ethically complex, that work was fundamentally about how stories are formed and told.And how they are performed; “Denis & Katya” existed in a theatrical space, occupied by two singers and four cellists, but also decorated with projections of Venables and Huffman’s correspondence, devoid of hierarchy or operatic tradition. It’s a concept the creators take even further in their new show, an astonishing feat of controlled chaos in which an ensemble of 15 does it all: sings, narrates, dances, plays instruments.Venables’s score is a delirious stylistic fantasia, with elements of folk, jazzy turns of phrase and Baroque instrumentation. He exercises a restraint similar to Benjamin’s, and is explicit, to comic effect, only when he is at his most prurient: An episode near the beginning recounts “the ritual” of cruising, building toward a climax of “ecstatic communion” and the exchange of something vulgar that can’t be repeated here, before the music quickly subsides to a piano. The Richard Strauss of “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Symphonia Domestica” would be proud.Throughout the show, no one artist can be easily described, because no one artist has a defined role. This approach to theater-making, in which each performer is essential to the whole, is particularly suited to the spirit of Mitchell’s book and its roots in his time at the Lavender Hill commune for gay men and lesbians in upstate New York.Kit Green, left, and Yandass, two of the show’s narrators.Tristram KentonBut some of the performers are given a little brighter spotlight. The musical direction of Yshani Perinpanayagam, an agile instrumentalist, holds the group together in crucial moments. Two of the narrators naturally stand out: Yandass, a dynamo of speech delivery and dance, and Kit Green, a presence at once charismatic, commanding and thoroughly comedic. Venable’s score is at its most patient showcasing the vocal beauty of Deepa Johnny and Katherine Goforth, but also reveals flashes of Collin Shay’s gifted countertenor (not to mention their talent at a keyboard).That the performers are presented as such — a group of artists sharing Mitchell’s fable rather than embodying it, as they constantly break the fourth wall — also helps to sidestep some of the book’s dated, peak-hippie politics. Venables and Huffman treat the non-Men other as a universal concept that applies, extremely broadly, to anyone oppressed. But a passage that warns against assimilation, of “looking like the Men,” has a narrower focus. Blending in is a distinctly white, gay, bourgeois luxury; not for nothing was Pete Buttigieg the first openly queer person to stand a chance at the American presidency.Yet that contradiction, a dramaturgical wrinkle in an appropriately wrinkled show, is at the heart of queerness as an unfinished project — one still in search of, if not Mitchell’s utopia, then some kind of post-liberation happiness. And that will take time. More

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      At Glamorous French Festivals, Poverty Is Only Onstage

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      The opening productions of the Avignon and Aix-en-Provence Festivals brought tales of the down-and-out to well-heeled spectators. It got awkward.Two events tower over France’s summer festival season each July, held in cities less than 50 miles apart. One, the Avignon Festival, is a bustling, overcrowded celebration of theater; the other, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, offers a more genteel operatic lineup.This week, well-heeled audiences sat down to opening productions at both festivals. Aix, in lieu of opera singers, unusually welcomed actors from the Comédie-Française, France’s most storied theater troupe, for “The Threepenny Opera,” directed by Thomas Ostermeier; in Avignon, the theater collective In Vitro was supplemented with some new faces for Julie Deliquet’s “Welfare.”Both productions touched on a subject that was an awkward fit for those affluent crowds: poverty.Since France has seen the cost of living rise quickly over the past year, it might have felt like an appropriate nod to the times. Yet few things are trickier onstage than asking actors — a profession in which the working class is hardly well-represented — to act “poor.”In the event, the Comédie-Française fares better than Deliquet’s actors, if only because Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 “The Threepenny Opera” is a riotous satire. Its amoral criminals and beggars are over-the-top inventions, and Ostermeier’s visually subdued production derives most of its pleasures from letting the cast’s superb talents loose.“Welfare” is another matter. It is a close adaptation of a searing 1975 documentary by Frederick Wiseman, who brought his cameras to a New York welfare center and bore witness as claimants dealt desperately with a rigid system. Wiseman himself long wanted to see the material translated onto the stage, and brought the idea to Deliquet, the director of the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe in Saint-Denis, France.Yet “Welfare,” which shared the opening honors in Avignon with a dance production, Bintou Dembélé’s “G.R.O.O.V.E.,” looks as absurd onstage as it is affecting on-screen. No one involved seems to have realized the insurmountable issue: Re-enacting the hardships of real people with performers turns those people into characters, so their stories lose the ring of truth. Fostering the same empathy takes more work, but here, Deliquet seems hesitant to step in.It doesn’t help that the unaffected black-and-white cinematography of Wiseman’s film has been replaced here with a technicolor recreation of a school gymnasium, including a bright teal floor that stretches across the vast outdoor stage of the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s most imposing performance venue. It’s as if the sitcom “That 70s Show” had opted to tackle welfare benefits, complete with well-cut, visibly new costumes. (Nothing says “my children are about to starve” like a neatly placed red beret.)The stories told in Wiseman’s film are loosely reorganized here into a day in the life of a welfare center, as case workers deal with one exasperated claimant after the next. One man lost his home in a fire. A couple of recovering addicts are trying to get their lives back on track. A heavily pregnant woman is asked for medical proof of her condition, while the husband of an older lady is withholding her checks.There are comedic moments in the film, but in Deliquet’s stage version, they start to feel involuntarily farcical. The energetic delivery of the cast may be because they need to project in the cavernous space, which holds around 2,000 spectators. The actors playing the claimants use their moments in the spotlight to play up the injustice of the system, instead of simply exemplifying it, as Wiseman’s subjects did so effectively.“Welfare” means well, and it’s easy to see why the new director of the Avignon Festival, Tiago Rodrigues, opted to put the project in a prestigious spot. It acts as a statement of change after the lumbering tenure of his predecessor, Olivier Py, and Deliquet is only the second woman director to receive a Cour d’Honneur slot in the 76-year history of the Avignon Festival.Deliquet deserves it: She is one of France’s top theater-makers, with a string of successes to her name. In “Welfare,” however, she is too respectful of Wiseman’s source material. Some directors, like Alexander Zeldin with his “Inequalities” trilogy, have found the right tone in recent years to tackle underprivileged lives, but “Welfare” looks as if it is playing at poverty.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella in Thomas Ostermeier’s “The Threepenny Opera,” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.Jean-Louis FernandezIn Aix, “The Threepenny Opera” may not be an unqualified triumph for Ostermeier, its German director, but at least the show’s roll-call of lowlife misfits is luxuriously cast, and with help from Alexandre Pateau’s sharp new French translation, comes across as it was presumably intended: wry, charismatic, brilliantly individual.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella are exuberantly, wackily brilliant as the shallow Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, who set out to take down the notorious criminal Macheath for eloping with their daughter Polly. Not all the actors are equally fine singers, so Vella’s powerful voice is an asset here. So are the vocal talents of Marie Oppert, a recent recruit to the Comédie-Française troupe and a trained singer who, in the role of Polly, turned “Pirate Jenny” into a showstopping number.Well-crafted scenes come thick and fast in the first half, but the energy tails off later. It’s as if Ostermeier, directing for the first time in an operatic context, stopped short of going truly big. The set designs are minimalistic: four mics downstage, a black platform behind the actors and a few screens above it that show repetitive Russian constructivism-inspired collages. On the main stage of the Comédie-Française in Paris, where the production will transfer in the fall, the company could simply repurpose the very similar set of Ivo van Hove’s 2022 “Tartuffe.”Maxime Pascal conducts his own ensemble, Le Balcon, who play off the actors well: At one point, a musician even caught a mic Benjamin Lavernhe — a whimsical highlight as the corrupt policeman Tiger Brown — had inadvertently dropped into the pit. Pascal’s reorchestration, adding electronic instruments, lent an intriguing edge to the biting momentum of Weill’s score.As in Avignon, the production was staged on an open-air stage of historical significance, in the courtyard of the Palais de l’Archevêché, where the festival was born in 1948. While it is reasonably sized compared to the Cour d’Honneur, it’s a prestigious venue, where audience members pay up to $180 for the privilege of seeing “The Threepenny Opera.”As with “Welfare,” there is whiplash in watching impoverished characters in such rarefied company. But that’s the reality of prestige theater today. More

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      An Opera Partnership’s Next Step: A Fable About Happiness

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      George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, who collaborated on modern successes including “Written on Skin,” return with the one-act “Picture a Day Like This.”In one scene of George Benjamin’s new opera “Picture a Day Like This,” which premieres on Wednesday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, a composer and her assistant cut off an interviewer midsentence. The composer asks whether there’s space in her schedule to speak; “five minutes,” the assistant replies.Thankfully, Benjamin had considerably more time to talk when he met with a journalist at his West London home on a sunny Monday in May.If the premiere of “Picture a Day Like This,” written with the playwright Martin Crimp, is highly anticipated, that is because anticipation has long accompanied new works by Benjamin, 63. Initially, for their infrequency — creative block in his early career meant that he produced only a few minutes of music each year — but lately for their critical acclaim.Earlier stage works with Crimp, “Written on Skin” (2012) and “Lessons in Love and Violence” (2018), have quickly entered the repertory of major European opera houses. But it is their first opera, the one-act “Into the Little Hill,” from 2006, that most resembles “Picture a Day Like This,” in its size, duration and subject matter.Indeed, “Picture,” also a one-act, could be paired with “Into the Little Hill,” a retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, for a future double bill. Still, “Picture” stands alone, an operatic fable about the pursuit of happiness. It combines two plots, Crimp said in an interview. The first, “The Happy Man’s Shirt,” is an ancient European satire in which a ruler nearing death is told he will be cured if he finds the shirt of a happy man; the only truly happy person he finds, though, is a man too poor to own one. And the second is based a Buddhist story in which a woman goes in search of a miracle to return her infant child from the dead.The hourlong opera, for chamber orchestra and a cast of five, “is a quest, like ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ or Voltaire’s ‘Candide,’” Crimp said. “But it’s a learning structure, if you like, which follows one character from beginning to end, where the encounters are with a variety of new people.”Marianne Crebassa, left, and John Brancy in a rehearsal for the new opera, a fablelike one-act.Jean-Louis FernandezCompared with their previous operas, which have rotated around a fixed point or situation, “Picture,” Crimp said, has “a kind of linear, sequential propulsion.” It follows a mother, whose child has died, on a quest to find the button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt (which will secure the child’s return); along the way, she meets a variety of flawed characters.“Within a structure like that, variety is very important,” Crimp said, adding that early discussions with Benjamin about the opera “gave him the license to experiment with very different tones and moods through the different encounters.”Accordingly, Benjamin said, the work “is like a series of bubbles” that the woman walks through. With no precedent or consequence to each moment, and without cumulative material to refer to or push forward, every scene change left him feeling like he “was starting a new piece almost entirely.”A solution was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov — whose writing fixated Benjamin as he composed “Picture” — and his mosaic-like approach. An idea would arrive fully formed in Nabokov’s head, but realizing it on paper would involve jumping around the structure of the piece. “He would write something that ended up on page 238, followed by something for page 5, something for page 15,” Benjamin said. “Bit by bit, these things would fuse from different angles, and suddenly the seamless text would be written at the end, but it wasn’t composed like that.”Benjamin’s opera was written with Martin Crimp, whose texts he likes to be challenged by.Violette Franchi for The New York Times“My experience with myself,” he added, “is that it would be a big mistake to start at the beginning.”Benjamin and Crimp are one of the most successful opera partnerships of our time. They were introduced through the musicologist Laurence Dreyfus in 2005, after Benjamin had met dozens of playwrights and film directors with a view toward writing an opera, including Arthur Miller and David Lynch. The composer Harrison Birtwistle encouraged Benjamin to “find the one person with whom it really works, and stick with them.”Crimp, Benjamin said, writes “terrifying, unflinching, and uncompromising plays” that contrast with a man who, when they first met, he found “gentle of nature.” Crimp said that their relationship has continued because they both have “a special respect for the work of the other.” The lines are drawn precisely in their collaboration; they decide on a story, structure and general trajectory, then leave each other to get to it. Benjamin said that Crimp doesn’t email him any drafts; “they just arrive,” he added, “in a brown, A4 envelope suddenly one morning.”At the Aix Festival, “Picture” will be directed by Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma, who staged the premiere of “Into the Little Hill” in Paris. In their treatment of the story, the woman is trapped in what they called a “mental prison,” in which the characters she meets — two lovers, an artisan and a collector — float in and out of her life.“It’s an adventure of a soul,” Jeanneteau said, adding that the key to the piece is its simplicity.Through simplicity comes banality, a consideration rich with possibility in playwriting but much more difficult in opera. When writing “Into the Little Hill,” Crimp had, at the back of his mind, the idea of incorporating banal language from everyday life, words like electricity, concrete and refrigerator. “Picture,” with its characters’ distinctly contemporary concerns — topics include mattresses, chlorpromazine and lakeside Austrian retreats — steps closer to his goal.“You can flirt with the banal on the edges of a musical work” like “Picture,” Crimp said, “but ultimately, that’s done to prepare the ground to enter into a much deeper metaphysical space.”Benjamin said that he has “always thought of orchestral pieces, even chamber music as a theatrical thing.” Even so, the drastic changes of tone in Crimp’s libretto for “Picture” have brought a new, dramatic volatility to his operatic writing.“I think he enjoys challenging me, you know: ‘You haven’t done this before, this will be hard, let’s see what you can do,’” Benjamin said of Crimp. “And I like that.” More

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      A Behind-the-Scenes Eminence Shapes a Festival’s Future

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      Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, is coming into his own as the leader of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — On a recent Monday afternoon, the Grand Théâtre de Provence here was almost empty, a few hours before a concert performance of Monteverdi’s opera “L’Orfeo.”An organ was being tuned onstage, letting out a fluteish wheeze. In the wings, someone was warming up with the dashing brass fanfares at the start of the score.And Pierre Audi, the general director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, which runs this year through Saturday and presented the Monteverdi, was painstakingly adjusting the lighting.“Warmer; it’s very dead,” he said to members of the festival’s technical staff as he stared at the glow on the back wall of the stage. The first act of “L’Orfeo” takes place in a meadow, which the performance would suggest with some treelike blurs of green behind the musicians. Audi wanted the color to be ever so slightly subtler, paler, more delicate.As the ensemble started to rehearse, he stood and watched, hands intertwined across his belly. The playing was spirited, but some of the singers’ bits of acting felt a tad awkward.“I haven’t done the staging,” Audi, 64, said under his breath in an accent not quite British and not quite French, with a sly smirk and an apologetic shrug. “I’m just doing the lights.”For the production “Resurrection” this year, Audi pushed for the abandoned Stadium de Vitrolles to be refurbished.Monika RittershausTaking it upon himself to do the lights for a mere concert wasn’t out of character for Audi — also the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the founder of the Almeida Theater in London, for decades the head of the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, and altogether one of the most eminent behind-the-scenes figures on the global performing arts scene.An experienced stage director as well as a renowned administrator, Audi doesn’t just work on grand strategy and schmooze with donors. He also gets into the details of craft, closely overseeing rehearsals. (The chatter this summer was that he particularly needed to help shape Satoshi Miyagi’s vaguely Kabuki production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”) Directors respect him because he’s one of them.After succeeding Bernard Foccroulle, who stepped down after 11 successful years at Aix, Audi was able to present just one iteration of this annual festival before the pandemic hit. But last summer, and this one, he delivered tenure-defining coups.In 2020, when all of Aix’s performances were canceled because of the pandemic, Audi managed to hold rehearsals for “Innocence,” a new work by Kaija Saariaho, with just a piano. And he was able to shift the premiere seamlessly to 2021, when it was acclaimed as one of the finest operas of the 21st century.This year, he opened the season at a new venue, which was also an old one: the Stadium de Vitrolles, a massive black concrete box built in the 1990s that had been sitting abandoned on a hilltop in an Aix suburb for over two decades.“When I arrived as director, I said to the technical people, ‘I want to see it,’” Audi recalled. “They kind of said it wasn’t possible — for a year and a half. And I had to be really tough: ‘If you don’t show it to me, I’ll stop being the director.’ It was the last day of my first festival, in 2019, and we went in with one lamp.”The premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence” in 2021 was one of Audi’s tenure-defining coups at Aix.Jean-Louis Fernandez, via Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThe graffiti-strewn building was in sad shape, but Audi, who had transformed a former Salvation Army hall into the Almeida in 1980 and was used to programming a vast raw space in New York, realized its potential.“I saw the height of it,” he said, “and I immediately looked at the real estate being very similar to the Armory.”For two years, he courted the local government in Vitrolles, which would have to shoulder much of the cost of the refurbishment. Audi began to plan a daring premiere production for the stadium — “Resurrection,” Romeo Castellucci’s staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave — without knowing whether the renovation would be ready in time, and without doing an acoustic test in the space.“He called me,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, “and I think he thought he would have to make a case, to somehow justify it to me: ‘We have a sort of outré idea that Castellucci will stage Mahler 2 in a half-derelict old building.’ And I just said, ‘Yeah, I’m in.’ I think he was disappointed it was so easy.”It wasn’t until last July that Vitrolles formally greenlighted the project. But Audi’s bet paid off: Work was completed on schedule, and while some debated Castellucci’s concept, “Resurrection” was generally applauded, a proof of concept at the start of a series of productions exploring the possibilities of the memorable, malleable space.“The stadium is the signature of Pierre Audi’s term,” said Timothée Picard, the festival’s dramaturg. “And it’s absolutely connected to everything he’s done from the beginning of his career. To imagine new relationships between works, space, stage directing, audience. Projects we couldn’t do in traditional venues.”Speaking to a small group of young artists during this year’s festival, Audi said, “I never looked at opera as something that had to deal with my trauma or my origins.” But he has linked his interest in repurposing unusual structures to growing up in Lebanon, a country that lacked theaters.At the Park Avenue Armory, Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly” was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” the Armory’s president said.Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times“Opening the stadium, for me, it felt natural,” he said. “You have to take any building and make it a space.”Born into a wealthy family in Beirut, Audi was raised there and in Paris and was educated at Oxford University in Britain. He was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, turning it into a center of experimental theater and music. Starting in 1988, he served for 30 years as the leader of Dutch National Opera, a period during which he spent 10 years also in charge of the Holland Festival.“The thing about Pierre was, it wasn’t going to be traditional old-fashioned opera,” said the administrator and coach Matthew Epstein, who advised Audi during that early period. “It was the expanding of the repertoire — both backward, toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for, and forward, toward so much contemporary opera. He’s a real impresario.”As the Foccroulle era moves further into the past, Audi’s Aix is coming into its own. He has added more productions to the three-week schedule and a denser lineup of concerts, expanding the budget to 27.5 million euros ($28.1 million) this year from 21.4 million euros in 2018, with plans for more, while maintaining the size of the staff; the increase is going into the art-making.He is presenting more Italian opera than had been the case here — “Tosca” in 2019; Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon” and a concert “Norma” this year; “Madama Butterfly” to come — and also more French works, including Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète” next year. Aix’s vibrant commissioning program will continue, setting it apart from the Salzburg Festival, the grandest of European summer opera events, which has focused recently on revivals of rarely seen 20th-century pieces rather than new ones.Audi has “a never-ending curiosity,” said Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader.Violette Franchi for The New York TimesA sustained relationship with Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will begin in a few summers. And Audi would like to convert the Château du Grand-Saint-Jean, just outside Aix, into a theater and a home for the festival’s young-artist program — but that project, unlike the Stadium de Vitrolles, would require an immense fund-raising effort, especially as public subsidies are a gradually ebbing percentage of the budget.As for the stadium, next summer it will be used for another ambitious project, but something completely different than “Resurrection”: a trio of films that will accompany Stravinsky’s epochal early ballets, played live by the Orchestre de Paris under Klaus Makela.“The important thing,” Audi said, “is not to imitate what we did this year.”This is in keeping with his general resistance to resting on his laurels, to doing what is expected of him. Nikolaus Bachler, another veteran artistic leader, said, “What I admire most about Pierre is he has a never-ending curiosity.” Rashaad Newsome’s “Assembly,” which Audi presented at the Armory earlier this year, was “completely different than what you might think would be interesting to him,” said Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president.But along with the curiosity comes a pragmatic side, a commitment to seeing those visions through. “He’s always anchored in some kind of technical reality,” Salonen said, adding, of “Resurrection”: “If he thought it could be done, I immediately thought this was something interesting.”“Honestly, this idea, coming from almost anyone, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Salonen said. “But when it came from him, I listened.” More

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      At This Summer’s Aix Festival, the Only Laughter Is Bitter

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      With two grim premieres among the offerings, Monteverdi’s sharp “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” was the highlight of a week of opera.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Few opera institutions have as strong a track record in new work as the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Two of the most significant pieces of the 21st century have originated here: “Written on Skin,” in 2012, and “Innocence,” which premiered last year.But the lesson of the festival is that you can’t just pop out a masterpiece a decade. You have to chug away with commissions, big and small, year in and year out, knowing that the vast majority will be, if not duds, then far from perfect.A tiny percentage of new operas end up with lasting importance, and that’s the numbers game Aix is playing. Sheer volume is key, as the Metropolitan Opera, with its recent pledge to present at least two contemporary titles a season, is learning.Aix, too, is putting on two premieres at this year’s edition, which runs through July 23. Neither fully satisfies, but I have great respect for the festival’s commitment to the contemporary as a pillar of its programming.The larger of the two is “Il Viaggio, Dante,” which dares to condense not just all three books of “The Divine Comedy” but also the poet’s early “La Vita Nuova” into two intermissionless hours. So Dante, recalling his past during a midlife crisis, is accompanied through hell and purgatory to paradise by a crowd: Virgil, his poetic model, as well as Beatrice, his eternal love; Santa Lucia, who spurs his journey; and his younger self.While Frédéric Boyer’s libretto spans a tremendous amount of material, the text doesn’t feel rushed, but as calmly solemn, prayerlike and formal as a ceremony of Gregorian monks, with choral incantations interjected throughout. And the prominent French composer Pascal Dusapin has responded with music of nearly unmitigated portentousness.His sound world is brooding, with grimly hovering drones, enhanced by electronic effects, under heated declamation. The orchestra rises to groaning roars — though these climaxes are more poised than raw — that tend to cut off abruptly, leaving the hazy resonance of bells and a shimmering battery of percussion before the next slow buildup.There is artful work here, as when a passage of droning is softly sandwiched by choral writing: a moist, mossy grumble below, women’s voices above. Young Dante — a trouser role, here sung by the clarinetty mezzo-soprano Christel Loetzsch — has a monologue of medieval-style spare purity mourning the loss of love. And near the end, Beatrice and Lucia’s vocal lines quiver and swoop like birds around a low, sober, sonorous chorale.The mythic, dreamlike pace recalls Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle,” but Dusapin’s approach is without much variety or tension. Hell’s range of sinners presents a clear opportunity for Bartok’s strategy — evocative showpieces as different doors are opened — but the score of “Il Viaggio, Dante” remains resolutely, drearily homogeneous: dully dyspeptic even in paradise.One of this summer’s premieres at Aix was a Pascal Dusapin opera based on Dante with, from left, Maria Carla Pino Cury and Jean-Sébastien Bou.Monika RittershausWhatever the opera’s flaws, though, it is hard to imagine it being better presented than it was here. At its premiere on Friday at the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Kent Nagano led the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Lyon in a rigorously elegant performance. The baritone Jean-Sébastien Bou was a steady but intense, impassioned Dante.Most important, with a video prologue and a coolly stylish set, the veteran director Claus Guth shaped the oratorio-like piece into a form approaching coherent narrative. Set in our time, his staging shifts among a country-house interior, a forbidding forest and the netherworld of “Inferno” — here a spare, surreal space, part circus (sparkly white suit), part Kubrick (weird twin girls), part Lynch (ominous walls of curtains and eerie howling).Shorter — just an hour, with a mere handful of performers — is “Woman at Point Zero,” performed on Sunday at the black-box Pavillon Noir. Based on the Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi’s 1975 novel about the pressures and limitations on women in a patriarchal society, the piece depicts a filmmaker interviewing a sex worker who has been imprisoned for killing an abusive pimp.Neither Dima Orsho (Fatma, the prisoner) nor Carla Nahadi Babelegoto (Sama, the interviewer) overplayed as their lines moved from speaking to light recitative-style singing to full keening in Laila Soliman’s focused, minimal staging.It was unusual and heartening to see an opera that had women directing, conducting, composing and libretto-writing, as well as starring. Kanako Abe led and abetted — slapping her side and making clicking and murmuring noises — six musicians of Ensemble ZAR, who played a multicultural array of instruments, including cello, accordion, duduk (an Armenian cousin of the English horn), daegeum (a Korean bamboo flute) and the bowed Persian kamancheh, among others. But Bushra El-Turk’s score created few new or intriguing colors from these unusual combinations, and Stacy Hardy’s libretto flattened the two women and their interaction into cliché.The other premiere is “Woman at Point Zero,” with music by Bushra El-Turk and featuring, from left, Dima Orsho and Carla Nahadi Babelegoto.Jean-Louis FernandezThe characters who feel the freshest at this year’s Aix Festival are populating Ted Huffman’s vivid staging of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Almost 400 years old, “Poppea” is startlingly contemporary in the gray zone of morality it occupies. Almost no one is entirely likable or unlikable; lust and ambition are simultaneously reveled in and condemned.At the jewel-box Théatre du Jeu de Paume — which seats fewer than 500, an ideal intimacy for Baroque opera — there is barely a set. Pretty much the only element is a huge pipe, half painted white, half black, hanging over the action, perhaps a symbol of the fate that never quite falls on the adulterous, power-hungry leads.Sexy onstage sex may be even rarer than sexy sex writing, but Huffman has guided his cast in scenes that are genuinely seductive, heated by Monteverdi’s exquisitely sensual music. The secret? For all its bare bodies and physical contact, this modern-dress (and undressed) production, which opened on Saturday, realizes that eroticism comes not just from lovers pawing each other, but also from distance. Similarly, having the performers spend their time between scenes at the sides of the stage, watching their fellow singers, somehow increases our sense of the characters’ depth and reality.To hear young, fresh artists in this piece, in this theater, was a joy. Fleur Barron was a wounded Ottavia, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian an agonized Ottone, Alex Rosen an angry Seneca, Maya Kherani a delicate Drusilla. Miles Mykkanen was uproarious, but not grotesque, as the opera’s two old women; Julie Roset was an alert Amore; and there was subtle supporting work from Laurence Kilsby, Yannis François and Riccardo Romeo.Their tones inflamed and acute, Jacquelyn Stucker and Jake Arditti were a Poppea and Nerone driven nearly mad with desire. The chorus before their aching final duet, “Pur ti miro,” has been cut, keeping this coronation a private reverie on which we spy.Leonardo García Alarcón conducted a small but potent group from his ensemble, Cappella Mediterranea, with almost improvisatory spikiness, but without losing polish. (Playing with larger forces on Monday, Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea’s concert version of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” felt a bit more diffuse, though Mariana Flores’s Euridice produced a serene final lament.)When it is performed at this level, “Poppea” is acidic and exhilarating. You giggle in astonishment at what these characters are capable of, and at what you’re capable of sympathizing with.This year’s festival is of superb quality but almost entirely without comedy: Besides the two bleak premieres, there are Romeo Castellucci’s mass-exhumation staging of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, a contemporary-refugee Rossini rarity, an icy “Salome” and an “Idomeneo” evoking nuclear disaster. In that dour company, Monteverdi’s bitter laughter will have to do. More

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      At the Opera, Humans Bear Witness to Atrocity, or Ignore It

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      Whether in works by Mahler, Mozart or Rossini, directors at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France evoke mass death and refugee crises.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — The bodies kept coming up.First one. Then another. Then a dozen. Then a hundred. After an hour of “Resurrection,” the opening night production at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, 160 decomposing corpses lay in neat, sickening rows on a stage covered in dark earth.The exhumation of a shallow mass grave is a grimly familiar sight: Sudan, Srebrenica, Veracruz, Rwanda, so many others. In March, Bucha, Ukraine, added to that litany a scene so eerily reminiscent of the one being staged here that the festival sent out an email assuring audiences that the director, Romeo Castellucci, had conceived the production a year before the war broke out.Three years ago at the Aix Festival, Castellucci presented “Requiem,” a staging of Mozart’s final work. In a series of enigmatic episodes, he set to the mournful, churning music an evocation of civilization’s full span, from birth — with plangent child singers — to vibrant, folk-dancing life, and shadowy implosion amid battles and nature’s destruction.His new piece, which premiered on Monday, is a pendant to “Requiem,” but Castellucci has done something quite different with Mahler’s 90-minute Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection.” Rather than short episodes, here there is a single, almost unremitting action: We watch a United Nations team silently excavate a site where a catastrophe has taken place.This spectacle risks tastelessness. But “Resurrection” dwells on these anonymous professionals and their experienced, repetitive choreography so endlessly and matter-of-factly — in naturalistic, unhurried real time — that it transcends a sense of aesthetic or moral pornography. Instead, the experience of watching it evokes that of watching the news or reading the front pages: waves of sympathy and horror that yield to powerlessness and numbness.Esa-Pekka Salonen led the Orchestre de Paris in the Mahler symphony.Monika RittershausEven the Mahler looks on this unbearable pain with a kind of detachment. The stage action is directly spurred by the sprawling symphony only a few times, so the moods don’t match neatly; this isn’t a soundtrack, thankfully. For all the intensity of the imagery, there is rarely a sense of emotional manipulation.“Resurrection” weakens when it does feel manipulative, moving from the reality of vans and body bags toward more sentimental symbolism: a white horse galloping onstage at the start, innocence soon to be tarnished; a U.N. worker who refuses to stop digging; a final, clichéd benediction of rain.But the Orchestre de Paris’s performance of the score, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, was properly savage, even raw — though also relished, unrushed. This was deliberate, spaciously paced Mahler, lilting but never too sweet in its ländler second movement, its third-movement danse macabre as haunting as ever.Golda Schultz sang the soprano solos with quiet purity, but she barely registered next to the mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa’s consoling but commanding “Urlicht,” focused but rich. The bodies driven away, the stage finally emptied, the symphony’s stirring, stentorian choral finale was a promise of rebirth directed at a field of upturned dirt.The site of the performance had its own symbolic charge. During its brief initial existence in the 1990s, the Stadium de Vitrolles, a huge, gritty black concrete box on a hilltop in a suburb of Aix, hosted athletic and entertainment events, as well as an attempted far-right rally concert. It has been abandoned for over two decades; the graffiti on the walls and its industrial scale give it the impression of Berlin squatting in sunny Provence. This production is a ruin’s resurrection, too.The stadium shares a cavernous mutability with the Park Avenue Armory, where Pierre Audi, the Aix Festival’s director, is the artistic leader. You get the sense that in spaces like this, with productions that couldn’t happen anywhere else, Audi is most in his element as a programmer. The rest of the festival is taking place at more traditional theaters, and while the musical values are generally superb, it can all hardly help but feel blander, less of a special occasion than “Resurrection.”The soprano Elsa Dreisig as Salome was the most eyebrow-raising casting at the festival this year.Bernd UhligAt the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Andrea Breth has done her best to stage Strauss’s “Salome” without its traditional luridness. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a cool and collected promenade of body doubles, without a hint of nudity. Even the decapitated head of John the Baptist, climactically kissed by the title character, goes unseen inside a metal bucket.The action tends sleepily glacial: The dimly lit set suggests an ice floe, which the characters cross as if trapped in a grayscale dream. The most eyebrow-raising casting at Aix this year was the soprano Elsa Dreisig as Salome, a role usually taken by those who also sing Wagnerian heroines. Dreisig, just into her 30s, is better known for far lighter roles like Mozart’s Pamina and Zerlina.But, aided by Ingo Metzmacher’s delicate, languid, sometimes muted conducting of the Orchestre de Paris, she acquitted herself admirably on Tuesday, singing with sweetness and, yes, a girlishness that you rarely hear from those who play this teenage princess.Michael Spyres, left, and Sabine Devieilhe in Satoshi Miyagi’s staging of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”Jean-Louis FernandezThus far — the festival runs through July 23 and features seven full productions, as well as a crowded concert program — Mozart’s “Idomeneo” has been the best played, with Raphaël Pichon conducting his ensemble, Pygmalion, with longing sensitivity on Wednesday. At the outdoor Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Satoshi Miyagi’s production has an air of ritual; the main characters stand in place atop plinths that slide gently around the stage. The lighting on occasion suddenly shifts to show the huddled masses working endlessly to keep this royal family in motion.The soprano Sabine Devieilhe sang with soaring grace as Ilia; the mezzo-soprano Anna Bonitatibus was a somber, secure Idamante; and the soprano Nicole Chevalier reveled in Elettra’s wide-eyed despair. But Michael Spyres, his tenor usually trumpeting, sounded uneasy in the title role, his phrasing abrupt and the top of his voice strained.Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s costumes are a blend of ancient Greece and Japanese Kabuki; Neptune’s wrath is here a stylized version of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like in “Resurrection,” real-life tragedies are ambiguously but potently evoked — as they are, too, in Tobias Kratzer’s production of Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon.”The Aix-like set of Tobias Kratzer’s staging of Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon” suggests the audience’s ties to the opera’s themes.Monika RittershausKratzer, who has swiftly become one of Europe’s most in-demand opera directors, makes the opera’s enslaved Hebrews into contemporary refugees, the Egyptians into corporate types in smart suits. Only Moïse occupies a timeless sphere — with a hint of camp — in Cecil B. DeMillian biblical robes.Leading the orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon at the Archevêché on Thursday, Michele Mariotti kept the pulse vital even in the score’s longest-arching lines and most gradually building ensembles. And Kratzer is gifted at eliciting forceful yet restrained performances, particularly in tense but unexaggerated duets. The production’s video elements — digital static, projections of social media accounts, the Egyptian army’s unconvincing drowning — merely distracted from this human element. And the rare opportunity to hear the opera’s full ballet music was marred by forgettable, seething choreography.As Moïse, the veteran Rossini bass Michele Pertusi was authoritative in declamation, a bit less so in long-phrased prayer. The rising soprano Jeanine de Bique’s voice is fascinatingly wiry: sometimes shaded, sometimes pristine, always urgent. The mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya sang with even strength as the pharaoh’s wife, Sinaïde.This “Moïse” ends with the Hebrews scattered among the audience for the final hymn of thanks for their deliverance. Onstage, bourgeoisie lounge at the beach, blissfully ignorant that they are tanning by the same sea where refugees have cast out in rafts, to live or die.Here, as throughout the evening, the back wall of the stage is one of Aix’s antique stone facades, with its idyllic Baroque fountain. It’s we in the audience on that beach, Kratzer is saying.But, like Castellucci in “Resurrection,” Kratzer does not seem interested in angry indictments, or pat accusations of complicity. His staging is, more subtly and powerfully, a sad, unsettling suggestion of our unmalicious but all-too-willing forgetfulness. More