Artistic curiosity and the lighter savoir-vivre in Aix-en-Provence have always shaped the summer music festival in southern France.
Mozart figures are part of the founding myth of the “Festival International d'Art lyrique et Musique”;
In 1947 one of the initiators introduced themselves to the sisters from “Così fan tutte” at a fountain in the Cours Mirabeau, the magnificent avenue of plane trees in the heart of the city.
The following year the opera was performed in the Mediterranean courtyard of the former archbishop's palace;
an institution was born.
The wind that always blows in Aix, even when the sky is blue, comes from the mountains. The magical Montagne Sainte-Victoire that Paul Cézanne was obsessed with dominates the scene. Darius Milhaud, a Provencal-Jewish composer, later a cosmopolitan who grew up in Aix around 1900, only got to know the sea as an adult. Since the first edition of the festival, his music has wrongly not been played here, but only "honored" - next to the conservatory that bears his name is the "Darius" bistro.
The mountains were also of great importance to Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.
Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra combined Strauss' orchestral suite “Der Bürger als Edelmann” with Mahler's “Lied von der Erde”.
The suite has its warm moments when Strauss very gently quotes an original minuet by Lully.
Here, too, Rattle and the LSO are all to themselves.
But the impression remains: “Strauss dazzles and flashes, Mahler glows and shines,” as artist friend Ida Dehmel pointed out.
Oriental poetry struck a vital nerve with Mahler
Especially in the orchestral songs that Mahler created a few years before his death based on poems from the collection “The Chinese Flute” by Hans Bethge. The popular collection with adaptations of oriental poetry (1907) was set to music by a number of composers, most recently by Krzysztof Penderecki in his sixth symphony. With Mahler they hit the nerve of life. Joy in beauty and youth glow again, but Mahler's music strives forwards on the way into eternity. The instruments don't paint, they have wise, sweeping voices. So the English horn, so the deepest trumpet sound, which powerfully introduces the farewell verses: "The sun falls behind the mountains / The evening rises in all valleys." Magdalena Kožená and the superbly creative tenor Andrew Staples, alternately singing,let yourself be drawn into this “I-Music” (said Mahler's friend Bruno Walter); the tenor articulates more clearly than the mezzo-soprano.