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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

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      Review: A Composer Creates Her Masterpiece With ‘Innocence’

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      Kaija Saariaho’s grand yet restrained new opera about a tragedy and its reverberations is the most powerful work of her five-decade career.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — “Innocence,” the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, begins in soft, somber gloom. A shadowy mist of cymbal rises off long, sepulchral tones down in the basses and contrabassoon, before a keening fragment of bassoon pierces the quiet with melancholy song.It’s just a few seconds of music, but a mood has been established — comprehensively, unforgettably, yet subtly. Before we know the plot of “Innocence,” we feel it: Something dark and deep has happened, from which memory vibrates into an uncertain future, etched with mourning.We keep feeling it over the hundred minutes that follow, as we come to know intimately a tragedy and its reverberations. Grand yet restrained, a thriller that is also a meditation, “Innocence” is the most powerful work Saariaho has written in a career now in its fifth decade.Appearing through July 12 here at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (and streaming on arte.tv on Saturday) after its planned debut in 2020 was canceled, it would be the premiere of the year even in a normal season — even if its audience were not so hungry for real, big, important, live opera after so many months largely without. It deserves to travel far beyond an already global itinerary: Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Magdalena Kozena, standing at left next to Jukka Rasilainen, with Pursio at right, is a waitress at the wedding with a connection to the family.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThis is undoubtedly the work of a mature master, in such full command of her resources that she can focus simply on telling a story and illuminating characters. Unlike so many contemporary operas, “Innocence” — featuring the mighty London Symphony Orchestra, conducted with sensitivity and control by Susanna Malkki — doesn’t feel like a sung play with a more or less disconnected, elaborately self-regarding orchestral soundtrack.In fact, during the performance I attended, on Tuesday, I periodically tried to listen exclusively to the instrumental lines and their interplay, but despite the obvious virtuosity and density of the score, my ears kept lifting back up to the stage, to the lucid, inexorable action, the integrated theatrical whole. Porous and agile; simmering beneath and around the voices; and only occasionally, briefly exploding, this is music as a vehicle for exploring and intensifying drama. It is complex, yet confident enough to exist not merely for its own sake.With a libretto by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, and translation work on more than a half-dozen languages by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” is set in 21st-century Helsinki, where there has been a deadly shooting at an international school. The action continually shifts back and forth between a recollection of the disaster, by six students and a teacher who went through it, and a wedding party happening 10 years later.It quickly becomes obvious that the two events are linked. The groom is the shooter’s brother, and his family, which has been ostracized and is desperate to move beyond what happened, has kept the whole thing from the bride. (If that wasn’t enough, there’s a reason a waitress has been skulking around, jaw clenched, on the nuptial sidelines: She is the mother of one of the victims.)There is ample operatic precedent for an innocent young woman guided blindly by her lover into a world of violence and deception: Think of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” “Innocence” recalls those, as well as the ferocious economy of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Strauss’s “Elektra” in its relatively modest, intermissionless length.Lucy Shelton, at top, as a teacher, and, from left at bottom, Beate Mordal, Julie Hega, Simon Kluth, Camilo Delgado Díaz and Marina Dumont as students affected by a school shooting.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceBut “Innocence” is very much of our time, and — in its play of multiple languages and registers of speaking and singing — very much itself. Saariaho gave it the working title “Fresco”; it was inspired, she has said, by “The Last Supper,” from which she derived the size of the cast (13 soloists) and the piece’s broader questions of culpability and the linked yet separate experiences of people who have shared a trauma.Members of the wedding party sing: the groom, a tenor, in boisterous exhortations; the bride, a soprano, with sweet lyricism. A priest, the only friend the family has left, murmurs ominously about the faith he has lost.The surviving students and teacher, on the other hand, speak — though in precise rhythms artfully tailored to their respective languages of Czech, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. The waitress’s daughter, Marketa (a memorably rapt Vilma Jaa), appears as a kind of phantom, singing in the eerily plain style of Finnish folk music. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir chants offstage, a hint of a world beyond the fevered hothouse of the plot. All these disparate vocal worlds are linked by the orchestra, which wraps around the singers lightly and sleekly — never explicitly underlining them, never competing.The cast matches Saariaho’s score in its commitment and discipline, its refusal to fall into overplaying or Grand Guignol. As the waitress, Magdalena Kozena is a laser beam of pain; as the mother of the groom, Sandrine Piau conjures the uncanny effect of a voice thinned to a thread by suffering.Saariaho’s past operas — starting with the stylized medieval parable “L’Amour de Loin” (2000) — were mostly collaborations with the director Peter Sellars, who lends even canonical works the abstraction of ritual. Here, though, she benefits from a hypernaturalistic staging by Simon Stone, whose style anchors “Innocence” in reality without stinting its surreal fluidity. (Chloe Lamford’s rotating, ever-mutating two-story set, an anxiety-inducing amalgam of school and restaurant, is a crucial player in the drama.)The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Varying degrees of guilt slowly seep outward from the shooter to encompass even seemingly blameless characters. A gun was inadvertently provided; suspicious behavior went unreported; a boy was mercilessly teased and assaulted.This is not an unfamiliar plot, and like any superb opera, “Innocence” would seem flat if its text were delivered as a play. That it instead has brooding nuance is thanks to the music; the varieties of vocalization; Saariaho’s intimation, even as she delivers a clear story, that there is much beyond what is enunciated. Opera, as it always has been, is here a home for emotions that could come across as flatly, implausibly extreme, but which are rendered newly mysterious and natural.Kozena and Farahani in the opera. The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-Provence“Innocence” also gains depth from the politics and history from which it has emerged. Watching events of this kind, in this period, unfold in and around an international school, it is hard not to think of Europe itself, and of its formation as a union in the wake of unspeakable violence. There was a dream that trauma would prove unifying; we have witnessed the gradual realization that the opposite is true. In transitioning from the before times — native languages and folk song — into the lingua franca of English and musical modernism, this onstage society seems to have gained little. Certainly not the ability to fully integrate new members, to function.Yet the opera’s final moments are not without a certain hopeless hopefulness. The students describe small steps they’ve taken to move beyond the tragedy; the vision of the daughter asks the waitress to stop buying her birthday presents, to let her go. The music seethes sadly at this, but the dissonance passes through a sublime moment of consonance — courting sunshine — before drifting back into tension, then transpiring upward into pure shimmer, almost toneless. It is both through and beyond music, then, that Saariaho arrives at an ending that is, if not happy, strangely, completely exhilarating.InnocenceThrough July 12 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, France; and livestreamed on arte.tv July 10; festival-aix.com. More

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      Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points Meet in the Atmosphere

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      On “Promises,” their new collaborative album, Sanders’s tenor saxophone becomes one with the electronic composer’s web of humming synthesizers.When Pharoah Sanders first heard “Elaenia,” the stewy and transporting debut album by the British electronic musician and composer Sam Shepherd, who performs as Floating Points, he was rapt. It had been almost two decades since Sanders, the tenor saxophonist and American jazz eminence, had released a major new album, but he said he would like to try working with Shepherd.The natural affinity between the now 80-year-old Sanders and the 34-year-old Shepherd makes sense. Despite the generational differences, they’re united by an impulse toward constant expanse, and both see healing as central to the role of music. And each of them is interested in how duration works as a kind of artistic medium in itself.On “Crush,” his most recent solo album, Shepherd treated techno and house beats as a laboratory for experiments into the possibilities of disarray, while incorporating sophisticated orchestral arrangements. He recorded the album quickly at his home studio after a long tour, where he had honed his new creative direction in front of audiences while opening for the British band the xx. It meant that even as his composing delved more deeply into classical inspirations, he was in conversation with dance music.But “Promises,” his new collaboration with Sanders that will be released Friday, came about in a different way, over a week together in the studio in 2019, and rather than techno its deepest grounding is in a kind of minimalism. It’s basically one continuous 46-minute piece of music, written by Shepherd, though it is broken up into nine separate tracks, labeled “movements.” For the majority of the piece, a simple motif repeats — a twisty phrase of just a few notes, played on harpsichord and piano and synth, rising and disappearing at the rate of an enormous person’s sleeping breath — as a two-chord harmonic progression recurs around it.Shepherd adorned this with sometimes-spare, sometimes-soaring string arrangements, which the London Symphony Orchestra plays in conversation with his aerial synthesizer lines. Not until the latter half of the album does the orchestra fully come alive, with a rich and immersive passage on Track 6 — sometimes regal, sometimes bluesy — that almost eclipses the motif, but not quite.And then there is Sanders’s tenor saxophone, a glistening and peaceful sound, deployed mindfully throughout the album. He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.Like some of Shepherd’s synth phrases, Sanders’s saxophone sometimes announces itself faintly: You’ll just hear him breathing softly through the mouthpiece, or tapping it with his tongue, before he passes a full note through the instrument. When he plays his final notes of the album, at the end of Track 7, he does not so much disappear as become one with Shepherd’s web of humming synthesizers.Sanders is known for pioneering a manifestly spiritual approach to jazz, having taken the mantle from John Coltrane, his former boss, after Coltrane’s death in 1967. But before joining him Sanders had also worked in the mid-1960s with Sun Ra, the visionary bandleader, who converted Sanders’s given name, Ferrell, into Pharoah, and taught him by example how to reimagine the possibilities of a large ensemble. From his first release on Impulse! Records, “Tauhid” (1967), Sanders made suite-length pieces with medium-to-big ensembles that spanned multiple sections and hovered at various registers, as if traversing the layers of the atmosphere.Floating Points insists on something similar, in a different context. Listen to the synths and bubbling bass percussion of “Elaenia” (2015) or “Crush,” and then listen back to the commingled mallet percussion and reeds and wobbly bowed strings on an old Sanders track — say, the title piece of his 1972 album, “Wisdom Through Music”: It’s easy to toggle between them and stay in the same head space.“Promises” is basically one continuous 46-minute piece of music, written by Shepherd, with Sanders’s tenor saxophone deployed mindfully throughout.Eric Welles-NyströmLike Sanders, Shepherd had some of his earliest exposure to music in church, as a choirboy at Manchester Cathedral. He later earned a Ph.D. in the field of neuroepigenetics in 2014, studying the role of DNA in processing pain; his music, heady as it is, can often seem like a therapeutic bath. Where other virtuoso electronic composers these days, like Holly Herndon or Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), might use their control over our senses to unsettle, Floating Points usually feels like he’s taking care.He plays with sound at just about every frequency audible to the human ear; headphone listening will sometimes reveal deep bass rumbles or vanishingly high synth lines not fully audible through computer speakers. In the way of a great orchestral composer, he will introduce a particular synthesizer voice very faintly in the greater swarm, bringing it in gradually.Shepherd has also put our relationship to the natural world at the heart of his music, echoing a theme in Sanders’s work. His 2017 film-and-music project, “Reflections: Mojave Desert,” included recordings of the sounds of the desert swirling amid the post-rock he made with a band.Sanders’s music has always sounded like both an environment and a pure emotion, and his long, harmonically constant pieces could almost disabuse you of the entire idea of a start and an end. Nowadays, losing track of time is nearly impossible. On “Promises,” the greatest gift Shepherd has given us is that rather than emulating any style or genre from Sanders’s past work, he has found the nonmusical information inside it. By listening, he has heard how to slow down.Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra“Promises”(Luaka Bop) More

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      Scrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. Musicians

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyScrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. MusiciansThe decision comes as classical musicians struggle to deal with the impact of the pandemic and Britain’s departure from the European Union.A computer-generated rendering of the proposed London Center for Music, by the architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro. London authorities announced Thursday that the project would not go ahead.Credit…Diller Scofidio + RenfroFeb. 19, 2021, 11:11 a.m. ETLONDON — Back in 2017, London music fans had high hopes for a reinvigoration of the city’s classical music scene.That year, Simon Rattle, one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors, became the music director of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architects behind the High Line in New York, were appointed to design a world-class 2,000-seat concert hall in the city.Now, the situation couldn’t be more different.On Thursday, just weeks after Rattle announced he would leave London in 2023 to take the reins at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, London officials announced that plans for the new hall had been scrapped. Rattle had been the driving force behind the project.In a news release announcing the decision, the City of London Corporation, the local government body overseeing the proposal, did not mention Rattle’s departure; the new hall would not go ahead because of the “unprecedented circumstances” caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the release said.The announcement was not unexpected. Few private funders came forward for the project, and Britain’s government was reluctant to back the project, which critics had decried as elitist, after years of cuts to basic services.But some musical experts say the news is still a blow to Britain’s classical musicians, already suffering from a pandemic-induced shutdown of their work, and Brexit, which has raised fears about their ability to to perform abroad.“It’s a further confirmation of the parochialization of British music and the arts,” said Jasper Parrott, a co-founder of HarrisonParrott, a classical music agency, in a telephone interview.The mood among musicians was low, Parrott said, especially because of changes to the rules governing European tours that came about because of Brexit. Before Britain left the European Union, classical musicians and singers could work in most European countries without needing visas or work permits, and many took last-minute bookings, jumping on low-cost flights to make concerts at short notice.Classical musicians now require costly and time-consuming visas to work in some European countries, Parrott said. Changes to haulage rules also make it harder for orchestras to tour, he added: Trucks carrying their equipment are limited to two stops on the continent before they must return to Britain.Deborah Annetts, the chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, said on Tuesday during a parliamentary inquiry into the new rules that she had been “inundated with personal testimony from musicians as to the work that they have lost, or are going to lose, in Europe as a result of the new visa and work permit arrangements.”A British musician who wanted to play a concert in Spain would have to pay 600 pounds, or about $840, for a work permit, she said, adding that this would make such a trip unviable for many. She called upon the government to negotiate deals with European countries so cultural workers could move around more easily.Parrott said he expected many British classical musicians would retrain for other careers, or move outside Britain for work, if the rules were not changed.High profile departures like Rattle’s have only contributed to the impression of a sector in decline. On Jan. 22, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, a young Lithuanian conductor seen as a rising star, announced she would leave her post as music director of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2021-22 season. “This is a deeply personal decision, reflecting my desire to step away from the organizational and administrative responsibilities of being a music director,” she said in a statement at the time.Manuel Brug, a music critic for Die Welt, the German newspaper, said in a telephone interview that, viewed from the continent, classical music in Britain seemed in a bad way, “with all this horrible news.”The new London concert hall “was always a dream, but at least it was a dream,” he said.Given recent developments, many British musicians and singers may have to consider moving to Europe if they wanted to succeed, he said.Yet not all were downbeat about the future. British musicians could cope with the impact of the coronavirus, or Brexit — but not both at the same time, unless the government stepped in to help, said Paul Carey Jones, a Welsh bass baritone who has campaigned for the interests of freelance musicians during the pandemic.“British artists are some of the best trained, most talented and most innovative and creative,” he said. “But what we’re almost completely lacking is support from the current government. So we need them to grasp the urgency of the situation.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More