Festival d'Aix-en-Provence

Last production staged by Patrice Chéreau, this Elektra will remain as the main and most striking lyrical event of these last years in Aix-en-Provence. This production is leaded by three amazing singers: the German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius gave a tremendous, never-to-be-forgotten account of the title role, Waltraud Meier portrays a human and chilling Clytemnestra and Adrianne Pieczonka is a fantastic Chrysothemis. Everyone's loneliness and intimate struggles are Patrice Chéreau's favorites theatrical themes. With Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Orchestre de Paris, this production of Elektra becomes an unforgettable experience.

A huge success when it premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1900, Gustave Charpentier’s (1860-1956) “musical novel in four acts and five scenes” was panned by the critics, who considered its depiction of female desire and its heroine’s rebellion against her family to be scandalous. In this new reading, Christof Loy (Salomé) – famous for his meticulous productions, precise direction and refined aesthetic – has detected beneath the innovative theme of female emancipation an unspoken aspect of Charpentier’s libretto: the toxic family relationship in which Louise finds herself trapped, and the hold that her possessive – even abusive – father exerts over her with the complicity of her mother. Keen to tell the story without judging the characters, the director draws the audience into Louise’s subconscious, highlighting the darker side of a society that, far from emancipating its daughters, only offers them cheap romance as a deflection from the frustrations of their limited prospects.

A decade before the French Revolution, in a country riven with bitter polemics, Gluck throws the history of opera into confusion by raising it to an unheard-of peak of tragic intensity. Experiencing his two Iphigenias in a single evening goes beyond the norms of operatic life: it is to enter the very heart of the curse on the family of King Atreus of Mycenae, to follow a logical destiny through a cycle of endless violence. How does the victim of Aulis become the murderess of Tauris? That is the burning question that Dmitri Tcherniakov must adress, plunging the spectator into the midst of a household haunted by the dead and setting in train an implacable process of dehumanization, with parallels to our world today. Conducting Le Concert d’Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm drives this dual tragedy to the summit of its expressive power, leaving humanity to be translated through arias of the utmost poignancy.

Here is an irreverent take on the tragic story of the lovers Orpheus and Eurydice. With his librettists Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy, Jacques Offenbach creates a wonderful array of characters from the heavens who find themselves caught up in domestic antics. In this enchanting production from the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence from 2009 with a young cast from the European Academy of Music, director Yves Beaunesne transposes the action to the 1940s and spreads it over the four floors of a bourgeois residence. From the kitchen (Orpheus' home) to the attic (the Underworld), via the dining room (Olympus) and the bedroom (Pluto's boudoir), he succeeds in teasing out all the humour and elegance of Offenbach’s satirical masterpiece.