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    This Year’s Aix-en-Provence Festival Is Pierre Audi’s Last Act

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    This year’s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival was planned by Audi but opened without him, following his death in May.As a small, invited audience trickled into the Grand Théâtre de Provence on Sunday morning, they were greeted with a large portrait of Pierre Audi projected above the stage. It was a solemn photograph, black and white, with Audi staring directly into the camera. But on closer inspection, it was surprisingly casual: His collar was imperfect, as was the lapel of his jacket, and a slight smile hinted at a deeper warmth.The crowd, made up of his friends, colleagues and family, had gathered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France to memorialize Audi, a mighty force in the performing arts, who died in May at 67. As the festival’s general director, he had already finished plans for this year’s edition, which began last week. But Audi was never really done with a show until opening night. He was known to visit the rehearsals for each Aix production, gently offering what help he could.“When I think of Pierre,” the opera director Claus Guth said in a speech at the memorial, “I always have immediately one image of him in front of me: Pierre sitting in the audience like a rock, listening.”Guth paused, then added that “pierre” is French for “rock,” and that “audi” suggests listening. “He was watching the actors, he was listening, but there was something parallel, as if he would look through what was happening onstage,” he said. “He would look into the soul of a composer, the soul of the artist performing, of the person inventing. He had deep knowledge and intuition, and could look beyond.”What did Audi see in those moments? Having spent his career as an impresario and director restlessly seeking new ways to present the performing arts, he might have been seeing possibility. He looked at a building in London that had fallen on hard times and pictured the groundbreaking Almeida Theater; he looked at an abandoned, graffiti-covered stadium off a Provençal highway and saw a cavernous new stage for Aix. In his last decade, he programmed the Park Avenue Armory, whose enormous drill hall he filled with the kind of shows found almost nowhere else in New York.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 Nine Jewelled Deer,” a New Opera, Has Nothing to Do With Antlers

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      A bejeweled doe hides in the forest to protect itself. One day, the doe sees a drowning man who calls out for help. At great risk, the doe saves him. He promises not to reveal the animal’s whereabouts but — enticed by a bounty from the king — he betrays the doe, and a brutal fate is suggested.The story of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a new opera that premiered last Sunday at the cultural center Luma Arles, in a co-production with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, is inspired by an ancient Jataka tale of India, exploring the Buddha’s incarnations in both human and animal forms.It has had a decidedly modern rebirth. That story piqued the interest of half a dozen luminaries in the literary, visual and performing arts, including the author Lauren Groff, the painter Julie Mehretu and the director Peter Sellars, galvanizing them to join forces to produce a nonlinear, highly metaphorical adaptation. Their version explores acts of betrayal and exploitation — of the earth, and especially of women. In some cases, its creators said in interviews, it is based on their own experiences and the experiences of women they know.Sellars, known for his avant-garde and socially engaged opera and theater productions, is the sole man among the core creative team. At the heart of the production is Ganavya Doraiswamy, a New York-born musician and performer who blends improvisational jazz with Indian storytelling traditions. Sivan Eldar composed the score and serves as musical director.During the performance of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” the singer, Ganavya Doraiswamy, onstage with bowls as part of a “kitchen orchestra,” like the one that her grandmother hosted.Theo Giacometti for The New York TimesThe sound engineering by Augustin Muller happens onstage, alongside musicians and vocalists.Theo Giacometti for The New York TimesGroff, the three-time National Book Award finalist and best-selling author, wrote the libretto with Doraiswamy and served as a kind of amanuensis, not just to the writing but to the people involved. Co-starring onstage with Doraiswamy is Aruna Sairam, a renowned ambassador of Indian vocal tradition, particularly South Indian Carnatic music, known for its devotional qualities. Mehretu, who had worked with Sellars on several operas as well — also based on ancient Buddhist stories, she said — contributed her characteristically abstract paintings that form the foundation of the production design.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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      Aix Festival: How to Experience It From Afar

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      Many of the offerings at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France are broadcast, or they travel to other theaters. Here are some highlights.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’Andrè Schuen, above, and Clive Bayley in “Don Giovanni” at the Grand Théâtre de Provence.Monika RittershausThe 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.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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      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