Aix-en-Provence (AFP)

Who is afraid of contemporary opera?

After the success of "Written on Skin" in 2012, the Festival of lyric art of Aix-en-Provence wants to repeat Friday with a new world creation, imagined in a breathless "opera-thriller" and sung in nothing less than nine languages.

A wedding, a Finnish groom and his Romanian bride, a French mother-in-law and suddenly the Czech waitress who feels bad during the banquet.

With ghosts from the past that come back to haunt all these characters struck by a drama ten years earlier, a shooting in an international school.

It took seven years for prominent contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho to come up with "Innocence", which should have been presented at the 2020 edition - ultimately rolled by the pandemic.

This opera, which will travel to Helsinki, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco, is the fifth by the Finn who becomes the first woman to compose an opera for the festival.

She notably created "L'Amour de loin", on a libretto by Amine Maalouf.

- A lost age of innocence -

Two of her compatriots joined this adventure, novelist Sofi Oksanen who wrote the original libretto and conductor Susanna Mälkki.

The director is Australian Simon Stone, in demand in theater and opera, who recently directed "The Dig" on Netflix.

For Susanna Mälkki, a passionate conductor of contemporary operas, creation has everything to have a "great impact" on the public.

"It's very narrative, almost cinematic," she told AFP.

Each of the 13 characters "has their own music and there is this back and forth between memories and the present moment", with "cuts between each scene like those we are used to on TV".

She considers that Kaija Saariaho was "very courageous" in the choice of this topical subject, a shooting in a school, while specifying that the opera goes beyond a fact that one reads in a newspaper.

"We see how it impacts people, it's very powerful".

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The scenes follow one another on a large set of two floors divided into several compartments and planted on a spinner - a platform that swivels -, a process favored by Simon Stone.

“Trauma is at the center of the action and causes everyone to lose their innocence in a different way; it's like when something dramatic happens to you and you remember how happy you were before,” says Susanna Mälkki who will conduct the London Symphony Orchestra for this creation.

- "A question of curiosity" -

With each opera creation, the question arises of the clichés surrounding contemporary productions.

"I am often told + it is so difficult, so complex. + Because it is not known, it is normal to feel confused", notes the one who is musical director of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor principal guest of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

"I think we must stop talking about contemporary opera as if it were an enigma; it's a question of curiosity and we must give a chance" to each new production, assures- it.

"It's like somebody gives you a book, you don't like it and you say to yourself + I'm never going to read a book again," she said.

"I am a great defender of modern music, but I sometimes go to concerts where I don't like it and that's okay!".

Since the success of "Written On Skin", composed by the Briton George Benjamin for the Festival d'Aix, which is considered an "operatic laboratory", she notes a tendency to "a return to the narrative".

"Opera is expensive, so you can never be sure it's going to be played 30 times," says the conductor.

But we must move forward to support an art "very alive and which has a say".

© 2021 AFP