The choir will rehearse with masks, the teams will be tested regularly, but Aix opens.
The edition will be held normally from June 30.
“This is a historic edition,”
says Pierre Audi, the director of the festival.
The pandemic is not over but the edition is held.
I call it a stimulus edition.
We are once again in the situation of a living festival that welcomes the public.
After two years of silence, it will be important to feel the pleasure and the urgency to create, to take risks.
And we are the first of the major festivals with international influence in terms of co-productions and retransmissions, to make this return of opera on stage and in front of an audience.
Before Bayreuth, before Salzburg. "
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The Festival d'Aix pulls out all the stops
Australia shines in this reopening. Barrie Kosky and Simon Stone, the two directors from this end of the world, each sign two productions, the first for the Théâtre de l'Archevêché and the second for the Grand Théâtre de Provence. One ordered for 2020 and the other ordered for 2021.
“Nothing is warmed up for all that,”
says Pierre Audi.
Barrie Kosky's
Coq d'Or
has just been created in Lyon.
Falstaff
has been ordered for this year. Likewise
the creation of
'Innocence
by Kaija Saariaho
was undertaken last year, up to the general piano, in the staging of Simon Stone, from whom I had ordered a
Tristan and Iseut
for this summer.
All sets and costumes were made in Aix this year and last year respectively.
This is what allows us this double blow. "
Another flagship production is added:
Les Noces de Figaro
looking at the #MeToo movement in a production by Lotte de Beer.
We have given up on "Woman at Point Zero" and a children's production but, other than that, we manage to keep what was announced in November.
Pierre Audi, festival director
“We have given up on
Woman at Point Zero
and a children's production, but apart from that, we manage to keep what was announced in November,”
says Pierre Audi. The emotion will be there. In the meeting of masterpieces with an audience to create an emotion, a debate. The festival director is proud that two world creations are on the program:
Innocence
, an opera in the form of a thriller and
The Arab Apocalypse,
staged by this man of Lebanese origin. This is because the festival, alongside the hits from the repertoire, takes care to program works that will be read as discoveries. Monteverdi, Rossi, Cavalli find themselves assembled in
Combattimento, the Theory of the Black Swan
under the baton of Sébastien Daucé. The concerts bring together great chefs with a few rarities. But the least of the exploits of this edition is undoubtedly the arrival of the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Simon Rattle. On paper, with Brexit and the Indian variant of the Covid, the arrival of the English training could seem compromised. Pierre Audi explains:
“The quarantines are complicated, we try to solve the problems in a responsible way. It is a long-term job, extremely well prepared. Artists have to get into this game. It's a spider's web but everyone is taken by the same interest. "