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    Jonas Kaufmann and Friends Take On Schubert at the Armory

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    The tenor Jonas Kaufmann stars in “Doppelganger,” a staging of “Schwanengesang” by Claus Guth, making his New York debut.In Schubert’s song “Der Doppelgänger,” a piano resounds with increasingly tormented chords as the narrator recounts a realization: that a pained stranger, wringing his hands in the night, is in fact himself.“I think there is something like a moment where your soul steps out, and your body is there,” the director Claus Guth said about the song over coffee in Munich. “It’s this shocking moment: You understand that you’re dying.”That instant, he said, is the heart of “Schwanengesang,” the posthumous collection of Schubert’s final songs, which is often performed as a cycle, like the composer’s canonical “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise.” And it’s that harrowing, transitional state that has inspired Guth’s staging of “Schwanengesang,” called “Doppelganger,” which premieres at the Park Avenue Armory in New York on Friday.The production — featuring the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann performing with his longtime collaborator, the pianist Helmut Deutsch — will be the New York debut of Guth, one of the most sought-after opera directors in Europe.Schubert’s music is regularly presented in the Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room, the site of most of the arts center’s recitals. But the composer’s songs, like those of “Schwanengesang,” originally sung in parlors, are much less expected, and seemingly ill-suited, for the vast drill hall. But “Doppelganger” will unfold there amid an installation (designed by Michael Levine) of more than 60 hospital beds occupied by wounded soldiers. Kaufmann will rise from one of them, to think back on his life at the moment of his death.Kaufmann and Guth at the Armory, whose enormous drill hall will be the site of “Doppelganger,” a staging of Schubert’s intimate “Schwanengesang.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe path to “Doppelganger” was long, and not just because the production, originally planned for fall 2020, was delayed by pandemic closures. Years ago, Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, approached Guth and Kaufmann about a music theater project for the drill hall, inspired by little more than their prestige and friendship, which goes back to their education at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich.“I gave them carte blanche to propose something,” said Audi, one of the few dreamers in New York who can still commission work on the monumental scale of the Armory. Kaufmann said that he and Guth discussed music by Strauss, Mahler and Wagner, as well as Janacek’s frequently staged cycle “The Diary of One Who Disappeared.”But the idea of mounting, say, Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” didn’t appeal to Guth. “If you have this huge orchestra, it will be the same structure you have at a normal concert,” he said. “So, how to get this very specific situation of not being in the opera house or concert hall? We thought it would be great to have in this huge hall just this lonely singer exposed.”They arrived at the idea of a song recital. And from there, Guth said, “It must be Schubert.”He researched the history of the Armory, and was struck as much by its use as a hospital and shelter as by its housing of a militia regiment. “It’s interesting to think of this place not as a drill hall, but the opposite,” he said.Guth also thought about the “Schwanengesang” song “Kriegers Ahnung,” in which a soldier worries about dying in battle and longs for “how cheerful the fireside glow seemed when she lay in my arms.” “My storytelling is, say, the last hour of this wounded soldier,” Guth said. “And in this last hour you see his flashbacks and his dreams.”Levine — a collaborator with Guth on a Metropolitan Opera-bound production of Janacek’s “Jenufa” — responded to that idea with a design incorporating a dreamily expansive field of hospital beds, in part as an attempt to rise to the drill hall’s size.“You want to address the space itself,” he said on a recent afternoon at the Armory, gesturing to the set as it was being arranged. “It’s a thrilling space to put anything in, and in a way it’s your responsibility to do justice to it. I’ve seen some beautiful, beautiful things here, but it’s not an easy space to get right.”He first submitted his designs in early 2020, just as he was reading about how Wuhan, China — a city of roughly 8.5 million people — was shutting down because of Covid-19. He couldn’t imagine that; it would be like New York City doing the same. Once that happened too, he began to see pop-up hospitals similar to the one he had conceived for “Doppelganger.”Now it has taken on an eerie resonance. Set vaguely in the first half of the 20th century, the production, with its rows and rows of beds, seems like a darkly familiar sight, especially to New Yorkers. And, Levine said, the isolation of a temporary hospital — whether during a war, as in “Doppelganger,” or somewhere like the Javits Center in the early days of the pandemic — is supported, even amplified, by Schubert’s music.“There’s something lonely about these songs,” Levine said, “and there’s something quite lonely about this space.”Kaufmann will be lightly amplified, but the concept of “Doppelganger” still relies on a performer with his immense presence, Audi said. “You need a personality like this,” he added, “because he’s alone onstage, and this is all taking place inside his head.”He won’t be entirely alone. Among the beds will be dancers, who play the parts of fellow soldiers, as well as actors playing hospital workers. And Schubert’s score will be joined by Mathis Nitschke’s original music — which joins the songs together, picking up the harmonic thread of one and transitioning to that of the next. (Deutsch also has a showcase in the form of an interlude pulled from a late Schubert piano sonata.)All this is possible, Kaufmann said, because “Schwanengesang” isn’t really a cycle. “We’re allowed to do something different with it,” he added, in a collaborative process among friends. “That’s our privilege, that we can present our ideas in a new package.” 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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      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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      A Beckett Play Comes Home to Paris, as an Opera

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      “Fin de Partie,” an opera of “Endgame,” will be sung at the Palais Garnier in French, the language it was written in.That grim and giddy slice of existentialism called Samuel Beckett Land doesn’t exactly scream out to be musically adapted, but the world of opera, where tragedy and comedy coexist, is exactly where at least one of his plays fits in.“Fin de Partie,” the opera of Beckett’s masterly “Endgame,” makes its French premiere on April 28 at the Palais Garnier in Paris. It is a sort of homecoming for this adaptation of the four-person, one-act play that he wrote in France, where he lived much of his adult life, after leaving his native Ireland.“Fin de Partie” reveals how Beckett’s play may be ideally suited to operatic interpretation and can now be appreciated anew since his original French words will now be sung, bringing the opera full circle four years after its 2018 premiere to a rapturous reception at La Scala in Milan.The esteemed Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, known mostly for extremely short works, sometimes only minutes or seconds long, wrote the opera — his first — in his late 80s. He also wrote the French libretto, which will now be sung for the first time in France.The same libretto was used at La Scala and in subsequent productions in Amsterdam and in Valencia, Spain. La Scala’s general director at the time, Alexander Pereira, persevered for a decade to bring the work to the stage, saying Mr. Kurtag is “probably the most important composer in the world at this moment.”It’s been a thrilling journey for those involved — and for those watching from the sidelines — to bring the piece to France four years later.“Beckett did not want this play set to music because he felt they were music as they were, and to add music would affect the impact, but Kurtag has a very special status in the musical world,” said the French-Lebanese director Pierre Audi, who is helming this production, which runs through May 19, as he has the previous three. “He has a very singular language that is very clearly compatible with Beckett.”The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag was in his late 80s when he wrote the Beckett opera. He also wrote the French libretto.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesThe play premiered in 1957 at the Royal Court Theater in London in Beckett’s original French, which he later translated into English. While it was not as successful as “Waiting for Godot” (also written in French, its premiere was several years earlier in Paris), it is considered among his finest works.“Endgame” tells the story of Hamm, a blind and belligerent man who uses a wheelchair; his befuddled companion, Clov; and Hamm’s elderly parents, who live in trash cans (and are therefore about as happy as you’d imagine them to be). In a stark and empty room, they await some sort of finality, quarreling and reminiscing in the way Beckett characters do: desperate, sad and remarkably funny.“Fin de Partie” is the first musical or operatic adaptation of any work by Beckett, who died in 1989, since his estate has long guarded against adaptations.The French composer Pierre Boulez, who died in 2016, had for years expressed interest in adapting “Waiting for Godot” as an opera. That never came to fruition, but Mr. Krutag’s proposal to adapt “Fin de Partie” apparently made sense.“Edward Beckett, Samuel Beckett’s nephew, has a very astute sense of what his uncle would and would not have wanted,” said Jean-Michel Rabaté, an author, professor and Beckett authority. “Through music, this play takes on a new relevance, because what Kurtag has done through composing is interpret the play.”But interpreting Beckett is akin to interpreting, say, Eugène Ionesco or Harold Pinter. Absurdist theater is so tied to its language and a nuanced humor that it’s not an obvious, or simple, choice to interpret. Tone is key, Mr. Audi said.“Kurtag is faithful to Beckett and has done something that you can argue goes in a sense the way Beckett wanted his plays to be performed,” he explained. “A musical version is by definition an interpretation. You are making interpretive decisions.”Beckett was no stranger to interpretation himself. He translated French poetry into English, and wrote many of his early poems in French, long before he began writing plays.“What is interesting is that he decided to write in French, first in poetry,” Mr. Rabaté said. “French is much simpler and lyrical. He translated a lot of the French Surrealist poets, and in English they were opaque and full of illusion. But in French it was simple and you just heard the voice.”Samuel Beckett, at a 1961 rehearsal of “Waiting for Godot” in Paris, did not want his plays set to music as he believed the words were already music as written.Boris Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet, via Getty ImageBeckett’s ties to France, and the French language, are legendary. He could have fled France when the Nazis invaded in 1940, but, as he was quoted as saying, “I preferred France in war to Ireland in peace.”He joined the French Resistance, and even though he was fluent in French, he had an Irish accent, which made him vulnerable to being discovered. After almost being caught by the Gestapo in Paris, he lived in rural southern France in hiding for many years until the war ended.“His French was oral French learned in the countryside when he was hiding from the Nazis,” Mr. Rabaté said. “‘Fin de Partie’ has a few untranslatable moments in French, because the jokes are funnier in French and the French text is much more bawdy.”This toggling between the languages proved interesting when his plays, usually written in French, became sensations on the English-speaking stage, despite not only some humor lost in translation but also the severe censorship laws in England in the 1950s (cue the bodily functions and anatomical references of “Godot”).Over the decades, Beckett’s works became standard repertory, but perhaps it was time for the first opera based on one of his works, Mr. Audi pointed out, especially since Mr. Kurtag saw the original Paris production of “Fin de Partie” in the early 1960s and was awestruck.“You need a very special kind of a composer to capture the essence of Beckett, but I don’t see many composers who have that kind of passion for Beckett,” Mr. Audi said. “You need to be obsessed with Beckett. Mr. Kurtag has had that for much of his life.”Mr. Kurtag, now 96 and living in Budapest, was unable to travel to see any of the previous productions and is not expected to go to Paris. Two performances that were planned in Hungary were canceled because of the pandemic. But, Mr. Audi said, Mr. Kurtag has seen a video recording of the original production and attended a concert version, which included the original cast, in Budapest in 2018.For Mr. Audi, it’s a career high to see an original piece of work be so seamlessly adapted.“My role as a director is to arbitrate between the composer’s vision and the writer’s vision,” Mr. Audi said. “In the end what he has composed is the essence of the play. For me the opera is complete.” More

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      A Festival Has a Monumental Premiere (and Some Other Operas, Too)

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      At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, it was hard for even beloved classics to live up to the elegant intensity of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — I mean it as high praise when I say that at this summer’s edition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, none of the operas come close to Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered here on July 3.Ushering new work into the world is perhaps an operatic institution’s most difficult task. This is an art form so stubbornly lodged in the past that it always feels like a miracle when a “création,” as the French call it, succeeds.And “Innocence,” which explores the aftermath of a deadly school shooting, does more than succeed. With riveting clarity and enigmatic shadows, and through a range of languages in different registers of speaking and singing, it captures both the promise and darkness of cosmopolitanism itself.It is a victory for Saariaho and her collaborators, and for the Aix Festival and Pierre Audi, its director since 2018. He managed to hold rehearsals with just a piano last summer, when all festival performances were canceled because of the pandemic, and to shift the premiere seamlessly to this year.“I have a long career in commissioning,” Audi told The Times recently. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It is hard for even the most beloved works in the repertory, some of which are on offer at Aix through July 25, to measure up to that. It felt symbolic that a moment that was devastating in “Innocence” — a character crushing a handful of cake onto another — returned as a silly, passing bit of slapstick the following evening in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”The carnivalesque staging of Mozart’s “Le Nozzi di Figaro.”Jean-Louis FernandezLotte de Beer’s “Figaro” production is an intentional, endearing mess — an eclectic, attention-deficit explosion practically vibrating through different aesthetics, as though on a candy high. The overture is staged as traditional, raucous commedia dell’arte; the first act is a raunchy multi-cam sitcom, on a set that gradually (and literally) collapses into a demented carnival amid the confusions of the Act II finale, complete with human-height penises strolling around.After intermission, though, the curtain rises on almost nothing — a bed inside a cube defined by white neon bars — and the acting is equally restrained and gloomy. Then the fourth and final act enacts a kind of utopian, queer-feminist knitting collective led by a minor character, Marcellina, the cast draped in garments of Day-Glo yarn. Out of the bed, which has come to be the site of male authority and adultery, an enormous, inflatable fairy-tale tree slowly grows.Thomas Hengelbrock led the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble in a crisp but sensuously phrased reading of the score. Lea Desandre was a bright, alert Cherubino; Jacquelyn Wagner, a Countess cooler than the norm.In the title role of Barrie Kosky’s staging of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Christopher Purves was also different than the norm, at least at the start. In the first scene, Purves’s Falstaff is shown not as the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit, but as a careful master chef, sensitively relishing his creations — and with, at best, a dad bod.Christopher Purves’s incarnation of Falstaff is not the usual gorging grotesque in a fat suit. As a careful master chef, he relishes his creations.Monika RittershausWhile Falstaff is often likable, Kosky’s implicit promise is that we’ll admire him, too. This never quite happens, as the production settles into a more well-worn groove, abounding in this director’s trademark vaudevillian touches: men pulling off wigs and dancing in skirts, the works. The title character’s seductions are barely more sophisticated than in a thousand “Falstaff” productions; the merry wives of Windsor’s revenge, little crueler.The conductor, Daniele Rustioni, led the orchestra of the Lyon Opera with a pacing that was genial but less than diamond-precise. The voices, including that of the game, hard-working Purves, were a touch too small for the roles. The test of a “Falstaff” is the effect of the great final ensemble fugue; here the sequence was pleasant rather than cathartic.There was musical catharsis to spare in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” with a supreme cast and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted with lithe flexibility by Simon Rattle. But Simon Stone’s staging — an almost comically realistic evocation of contemporary Paris, from a high-rise apartment to a Métro car — is perplexing, as it purports to explain the brunt of the plot as a woman’s fantasies after learning her husband is cheating.From left, Dominic Sedgwick, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Stone, who moved the opera to modern-day Paris. Jean-Louis FernandezPerhaps intentionally, but still frustratingly, the production’s line between reality and fantasy keeps getting blurrier, until it’s hard to know who’s really betraying whom, who’s getting stabbed and who survives. But if Nina Stemme’s voice has lost a touch of sumptuousness, she’s never been better as Isolde — singing fearlessly, and ardently invested in the production. Stuart Skelton sings rather than barks Tristan, a tenor’s Everest, and Franz-Josef Selig is a commandingly melancholy Marke.Aix has long been notable for placing smaller pieces, including new ones, amid canonical titans and grand-scale premieres like “Innocence.” In an enormous former ironworks at Luma — the new art complex in Arles, about 50 miles from Aix — “The Arab Apocalypse” was created as part of the festival’s heartening commitment to connecting southern France and the greater Mediterranean world.But based on Etel Adnan’s direly expressionistic poems about the Lebanese civil war, with music by Samir Odeh-Tamimi and a sketched staging-in-the-round by Audi, “Apocalypse” was dreary — the score alternating between shivering and pummeling, the action busy but bland.“Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory” was a grab-bag of early Baroque Italian music, with rich helpings of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Luigi Rossi and more. Silvia Costa tried to corral this gorgeous material into a kind of stylized pageant, a loose trajectory of war, mourning, society-building, more war, more building.From left, Julie Roset, Valerio Contaldo and Etienne Bazola in “Combattimento: The Black Swan Theory.”Monika RittershausHer images were more mystifying than evocative. But the performance, led by Sébastien Daucé, was musically exquisite, with eight superb young singers ideally blending purity and passion, and 13 members of Ensemble Correspondances filling the jewel-box Théâtre du Jeu de Paume with the visceral force of a symphony orchestra.Audi’s ambitions are to expand Aix, implicitly taking on the Salzburg Festival in Austria, which opens at the end of July, and is classical music’s most storied summer event. (While Salzburg is redoubtable, the mood, clothing and ticket prices in Aix are significantly more relaxed.)The program of concerts — which, in Aix, has long been an afterthought to opera, but is a Salzburg powerhouse — will grow, as will the scope of the festival’s productions. With “Tosca,” Aix’s first Puccini, in 2019, it declared that it could cover the red-meat Italian hits. In addition to Luma, Audi has his sights on other unconventional spaces in the region.Commissions are also central to his agenda; “Innocence” is resounding proof. Seeing it a second time, on Saturday, confirmed the initial impression of its intensity and restraint, its emotional pull and intellectual power.The production — like “Tristan,” directed by Stone — keenly depicts both the shocking reality of the central tragedy and its surreal reverberations, which carry years into the future. I question only one directorial intervention: The shooter, a student at the school, is eventually shown onstage, played by a silent actor, even though he is not in the libretto.This dilutes the mystery of the piece, in which all the characters revolve around, and run from, a figure who is absent, a kind of god against whom everyone’s innocence (and culpability) is measured. When he appears in the flesh, the opera’s impact wavers.But only slightly. This is a quibble with a staging that, in general precisely, aligns with an elegant yet savage work. While recalling the starkness of Greek tragedy, “Innocence” is also among the first operatic barometers of our globalized age’s travails. More