Guth, Claus

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares129 Views

    Lise Davidsen Is an Opera Star Worth Traveling For

    by

    Her high notes emerging like shafts of sunlight, Davidsen is playing the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” at the struggling Lyric Opera of Chicago.A new pop song is the same streamed anywhere. And if you wanted to see Beyoncé this year, she likely came to a town not far from you, giving pretty much the same show in Barcelona as she did in Detroit.But an opera star doing a role in Berlin or London doesn’t mean she’ll bring it to New York. When it comes to the art form’s greatest singers, there are things you simply can’t hear by staying put. And Lise Davidsen is worth traveling for.Davidsen, the statuesque 36-year-old soprano with a flooding voice of old-school amplitude, has been singing the title character in Janacek’s crushing “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago this month. Though she has been a regular presence at the Metropolitan Opera — where she will star in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” in winter — there’s no promise she’ll ever perform Jenufa there.So for those of us who hear in Davidsen’s rich, free tone the kind of golden-age instrument we otherwise know mostly through glimpses on old recordings, it was a privilege to be in Chicago.The added incentive was that the redoubtable soprano Nina Stemme would be onstage with her. At 60, Stemme is stepping away from the kind of dramatic touchstones, like Isolde and Brünnhilde, that Davidsen is gradually stepping into.Pavel Cernoch and Nina Stemme in “Jenufa,” directed by Claus Guth.Michael BrosilowDavidsen and Stemme in “Jenufa,” conducted by Jakub Hrusa, the young conductor recently appointed music director of the Royal Opera in London, in a grimly spare staging by Claus Guth: This was a coup for Lyric, especially since the Janacek has been running alongside a winning cast in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment,” as fizzily charming as “Jenufa” is desperately sad.Seen over the course of 24 hours this weekend, the pairing shows off the best of a venerable company that has been struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath, along with much of the American performing arts scene. Its chief executive, Anthony Freud, announced in September that he would step down this coming summer, two years before the end of his contract.Freud, 66, is retiring as the gap between opera’s costs and the demand for tickets grows ever wider. Financial pressures have prompted the company to pare back its performances; Lyric’s current season features just six mainstage productions, compared to eight in the last full season before the pandemic.But this was a weekend Freud could be proud of. The title character of “Jenufa,” set amid tangled romantic and familial relationships in a Moravian village in the 19th century, is secretly pregnant by a man who refuses to marry her. Her stepmother, a civic figurehead known as the Kostelnicka, desperate to keep the family from disgrace, kills the baby, a crime whose discovery leads to a stunned, sublime gesture of forgiveness.For this raw, agonized story, Janacek wrote tangy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths; obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters; passages of folk-like sweetness; vocal lines modeled on spoken Czech for uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity; and radiant climaxes.Davidsen’s upper voice is her glory: steely in impact but never hard or forced, emanating like focused shafts of sunlight. (In Janacek’s fast, talky music, the middle of her voice didn’t project as clearly, but this is a quibble.)For a singer of such commanding capacity, she is remarkably beautiful in floating quiet. She played the character with prayerful dignity, reminiscent of Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello”; at the beginning of the third act, when Jenufa starts to think her suffering might finally be behind her, Davidsen registered on her face and in her freshening tone a cautious but real happiness. This is a singer who acts with her voice.I’ve always thought of Jenufa and the Kostelnicka as antagonists — a spirited youngster facing a repressive older generation — but this performance movingly suggested they are more alike than different: two independent-minded women, both isolated from the village mainstream. And Stemme’s voice remains strong and even; this is not your standard acid-tone Kostelnicka; in soft duet at the start of Act II, she and Davidsen made a combination that evoked “Norma”-like bel canto.Hrusa supported that sensitivity on the podium. His vision of the score emphasizes its sheer beauty, encouraging smooth lyricism and a kind of musical patience, letting the drama unfold rather than spurring it on. Sometimes this feels like mildness, at the expense of spiky intensity. But that this “Jenufa” is played something like a sustained hymn often heightens the aching tragedy.Guth’s production emphasizes the uniformity and repetition that define this small town’s small-mindedness. A prisonlike atmosphere prevails in Michael Levine’s airy yet forbidding set, Gesine Völlm’s constricting costumes and James Farncombe’s lighting, all leached of color.Metal bed frames that line the walls in the first act are arranged, in the second, to form an eerie enclosure, reminiscent of a refugee camp, in which Jenufa has been hidden to give birth. An ominous crowd of women in “Handmaid’s Tale”-style bonnets lurks on the sidelines; a dancer is dressed as a slow-stalking raven. The folk-wedding dresses that finally add brightness in Act III convey genuine joy after so much ashy heartbreak.Fizzy joy: Lisette Oropesa in Laurent Pelly’s production of “La Fille du Régiment” at Lyric Opera.Michael BrosilowThat kind of joy permeates “La Fille du Régiment,” one of the repertory’s most delightful comedies, presented in Chicago in the winkingly stylized Laurent Pelly production that has been at the Met since 2008. (The mountain range made of old maps is still superbly silly.)Lisette Oropesa and Lawrence Brownlee are both sprightly in Donizetti’s stratosphere-touching coloratura; this opera is famous for a tenor aria with nine high Cs, and after an ovation Brownlee repeated it with flair. But the pair are even better in the score’s slower-burning, longer-arching passages of tenderness.Lyric Opera of Chicago may be in serious trouble; its chief may be taking an early exit. But, having attracted Oropesa and, especially, Davidsen to the company for these memorable debuts, Freud is leaving on a high note. More

    More stories

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      ‘Doppelganger’ Review: A Soldier Confronts His Mortality

      by

      At the Park Avenue Armory, an imaginative and viscerally shocking staging of Schubert songs from the director Claus Guth and the tenor Jonas Kaufmann.In the classical tradition, a song often evokes intimacy and solitude: a poet baring vulnerability, a composer painting a miniature. That sense of seclusion extends to the performance as well: a singer and pianist alone onstage, a listener absorbing the work in an intimate recital hall or immersed, alone, with headphones.These conventions surround the final group of songs written by Schubert, known as “Schwanengesang” (Swan Song) and published after the composer’s death in 1828 at age 31. But those expectations were upended in “Doppelganger,” which had its world premiere Friday at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall. The director Claus Guth, the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, the pianist Helmut Deutsch and a raft of collaborators transformed “Schwanengesang” at the Saturday night performance into an entire wartime narrative.Kaufmann is a soldier who lies dying in a military hospital. Far from being alone with Deutsch onstage, he is one of nearly two dozen injured and sick soldiers being tended by a fleet of six nurses, the rest of the cast is made up of dancers. Deutsch and the piano are dead center among more than 60 hospital beds that stretch across the hall’s immense floor. Kaufmann’s soldier spends the last hour of his life revisiting his memories in a cascade of Schubert’s songs, stitched together with ominous new music by the German composer Mathis Nitschke.Guth’s imaginative and powerful staging for his New York debut recalls history. This drill hall has served as a hospital and shelter; “Doppelganger,” which had originally been intended for a fall 2020 premiere, also invokes the field hospitals hastily erected at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.The inventive and minimalistic set design by Michael Levine is dominated by hospital whites, and the clever lighting is by Urs Schönebaum.Monika Rittershaus/Courtesy of Park Avenue ArmoryMichael Levine’s inventive and minimalistic set design is dominated by the blanched shades of hospital whites and khaki uniforms. Growls of Nitschke’s sound and clever lighting by Urs Schönebaum suggest thunderstorms and bombings.Does the theatrical conceit serve Schubert’s songs? In the hands of Kaufmann and Deutsch, who have long worked together, yes — and it reignites the master’s music in a fresh, intelligent setting without sacrificing the duo’s artistry as classical performers.At one point, the piano becomes a main character in the drama, as Kaufmann and the dancers gather to listen in respite to Deutsch perform the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960. It was a rare treat to hear Deutsch, who usually performs an accompanist, take literal center stage.In a concession to the Armory’s sheer expanse, Kaufmann’s voice was lightly amplified. This was occasionally distracting when he turned his head away from his microphone, and his normally crisp articulation was slightly muddied. But Kaufmann’s sweet tone transcended the limits of the technology, particularly in Schubert’s yearning song of desire “Ständchen.”In the evening’s climactic song, “Der Doppelgänger,” Kaufmann’s soldier encounters his ghostly twin at the moment of death. Although the audience knows this was coming, having already seen the soldier being mortally wounded, the theatrical ingenuity and visceral force of “Doppelganger” was so strong that the audience let out an audible gasp of shock. When was the last time you heard something like that in a classical concert hall?DoppelgängerThrough Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jonas Kaufmann and Friends Take On Schubert at the Armory

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Met Opera-Bound ‘Semele’ Takes Its First Bows

      by

      Claus Guth’s entertaining and often sexy new staging of Handel’s opera-oratorio hybrid in Munich is a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera.Staging oratorios in the opera house is nearly routine nowadays, especially those by Handel; for every “Agrippina,” you’re likely to get a “Messiah” too.Somewhere in between is “Semele,” a dramatic work that Handel described as “after the manner of an oratorio.” It lends itself both to the concert hall and the opera house, and with a long list of principal characters thrives best with a luxury cast — which it received at the Bavarian State Opera in an entertaining, lucid and often sexy new staging by Claus Guth that premiered on Saturday, a coproduction with the Metropolitan Opera that will eventually travel to New York.That “Semele” has been categorized as an oratorio has more to do with context than form. By the time it premiered at Covent Garden in 1744, Italian operas, which Handel had been composing for decades, were falling out of fashion, and he had moved on to English-language concert works like “Messiah.”In writing “Semele,” Handel and an unknown collaborator adapted William Congreve’s early 18th-century opera libretto of the same name. But rather than present it as a theatrical work, Handel disguised it as an oratorio for the Lenten concert season — even though the secular story, based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” wasn’t right for the occasion. There was hardly anything Christian about its brazen eroticism and adultery, or about a god having to explain to his mortal mistress that she needs rest because she doesn’t have his sexual stamina.Handel wasn’t able to have it both ways; “Semele” ran for several performances, then languished until the 20th century. But its resurgence has been richly mined, with musicians and directors continuously inspired by its Epicurean longing and sensuality, its psychological complexity and its timeless treatment of incompatible love — all thoughts and feelings, in Handel’s aria writing, repeated, examined sculpturally and reconsidered with doubt and revelation.From left, Nadezhda Karyazina, Rae and Emily D’Angelo in the production, in which the world of Semele’s fantasies is rendered in shades of black to contrast with the white of reality.Monika RittershausGuth’s production dives into the Semele’s subconscious, her frustrations and fantasies, on the day of her wedding. A reluctant bride, she is first shown posing next her groom, Athamas, before stepping out of a shell-like gown that maintains its shape without her. It’s not the last time that happens; she always seems to be getting into or out of a dress as she drifts between reality and daydream, between accepting her life and rejecting it.During the overture, crisply and briskly articulated in the pit under Gianluca Capuano’s baton, Semele and Athamas are seen posing with friends and family for increasingly cringe-worthy group portraits, their forced smiles as uncomfortably glaring as the enormous floral letters spelling out “LOVE” behind them. Distracted by a black feather — Guth’s nod to the libretto’s depiction of the god Jupiter as an eagle — Semele retreats into her mind, represented by a sudden change in light from bright to dark in Michael Bauer’s design.She imagines breaking out of her wedding’s austerely white, grand room with an ax as she tears a hole into the wall of Michael Levine’s bandshell-like set of a three-sided room enclosed with a ceiling. In doing so, she opens a portal into the world of the gods, where her affair with Jupiter will set off a chain of events that leads to her doom.Here, however, the story isn’t so straightforward. And neither are the performances. A Guth production often demands actorly skill of its singers, and in Munich — at the Prinzregententheater, one of the Bavarian State Opera’s smaller halls — the principal cast members were intimately close to the audience, exposed both visually and musically.No one more so than the soprano Brenda Rae as Semele, who rarely leaves the stage and is given one of the show’s most athletic arias, “Myself I shall adore.” As an actor, she sympathetically traced a downward plunge from hesitation to ecstasy, then harried despair and hollowed catatonia. Musically, however, she struggled to match the challenging score; her voice on Saturday was agile but thin, particularly through runs and ornamentation. Even the soft serenity she achieved in “O sleep, why dost thou leave me?” gave way, on a sustained trill, to a disorientingly jagged warble.As Jupiter, Michael Spyres, too, gave an unsteady account of a difficult role. His instrument remains baffling: immense in its power and remarkable in its baritone-tenor range, but also unwieldy and better suited to the legato phrasing of the famous aria “Where’er you walk” than the more acrobatically breathless “I must with speed amuse her.” At the end of that, though, he impressively joined a high-kicking chorus line choreographed by Ramses Sigl.He wasn’t the only singer given movement onstage. Jakub Jozef Orlinski, the countertenor in the role of Athamas, is also a breakdancer, which Guth spotlights when his character desperately attempts to entertain Semele. Charismatic and handsome, Orlinski stopped the show with the applause his dance earned. But more enchanting was the purity of his sound — sublimely crystalline in “Come, Zephyrs, come” — which blended warmly with the lower end of Athamas’s altolike tessitura.Orlinski, a break dancer beyond the opera house, is made to do so in a scene of his character trying to impress Semele.Monika RittershausThat aria, put in Athamas’s mouth rather than Cupid’s, made for a shattering juxtaposition with Semele’s “O sleep.” Orlinski and Rae sang near, but not at, each other, embodying that painfully familiar feeling of two people expressing themselves yet failing to truly communicate.As Jupiter’s enraged and scheming wife, Juno, the typically mighty but pleasant mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo seemed to have been handed a part not suited to her voice; but with the sprightly soprano Jessica Niles as Iris, she provided much of the show’s levity, through musical delivery and physical comedy. Charming, as well, was the bass-baritone Philippe Sly, his sound focused and vibrant as Semele’s father, Cadmus, and the drowsy Somnus.Among the smaller roles, Nadezhda Karyazina, as Semele’s sister, Ino, was prone to excessive gesture, but found a touching balance of outward emotion and poise in the climactic scene of her stepping in to marry Athamas.By that point, Guth shows Semele as alive, but so deep in her imagination that she can’t find her way back to reality; rather than reduced to ashes by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, she sits in the wedding hall lifeless as the world goes on around her. Semele may be free from the institution of marriage, but the institution endures without her.It’s a bittersweet ending that comes through persuasively and clearly. In that regard, when it reaches New York, Guth’s staging will be a fitting addition to the Met’s current era of many handsome, cosmetically modern productions. More uncertain, though, is how it will scale from the Prinzregententheater — whose seating capacity barely tops 1,100 — to the 3,800-seat Met, a company in desperate need of a second, smaller house.Semele transforms in the final moments from lifelessness to something like rebirth, suggesting that she may be more of a prophet than a mere dreamer. But the change occurs on her face alone; the question, now, is whether Guth can repeat that subtlety at the Met.SemeleThrough July 25 at the Prinzregententheater in Munich; staatsoper.de. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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