Aix Opera Festival: Let me touch your body

Richard Strauss' one-act opera Salome, based on the drama by Oscar Wilde, shines when it is performed at the Grand Théâtre de Provence.

With the Orchester de Paris, the conductor Ingo Metzmacher makes timbres that he has newly heard from the score tangible for the audience with overwhelming clarity.

In disturbing contrast to this, the director Andrea Breth emphasizes darkness, night, even apocalypse on stage.

The stage floor and walls are black, later becoming a dirty white.

Herod's final command, "One kill this woman!" comes out of utter blackness.

Here, however, darkness is not a cheap substitute for artistic imagination;

the blue-black fabrics of the royal household appear selected and noble (the costumes were designed by Alexandra Charles), and the stage floor with its shifting craters, ramps and elevations has a life of its own (stage: Raimund Orfeo Voigt).

The earth trembles in slow motion.

Because: The Tetrarch Herodes has a prisoner in the basement who announces the near end of the world.

Jochanaan, a hybrid of Old Testament prophet and John the Baptist, preaches repentance from the deep, now.

His guards do not understand the meaning of the words.

Herod is afraid of the prisoner, and his wife Herodias - the director saw this very clearly - is downright pursued and tormented by the voice of Jochanaan.

Her life is already hell for all her outer brilliance,

For her daughter, Princess Salome, a "chaste virgin" according to Strauss, Jochanaan is fascinating.

At first she is just curious about the completely different thing about the harsh young saint.

The harder he fights her off, the deeper she becomes, wanting to kiss his red mouth, alive or dead.

A duel is played out in this intensely focused performance during the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

This goes as far as physical cursing when he grabs her—"Daughter of Sodom, daughter of Babylon!"—by the neck to keep her at arm's length.

Jochanaan's music has a noble cantabile quality, the harmonies are clear and untroubled.

Gábor Bretz plays the part with confidence, his demeanor is natural when he fends off Salome's importunity: "I only listen to the voice of the Lord, my God." The psyche of his duel opponent is illuminated with provocatively dissonant music;

their emotional over-extension, especially towards the end, comes to light in brutal brass chords alongside tedious repeated notes in the violins.

And yet everything beautiful that Salome can imagine lies in the Straussian music of exuberance: "Let me touch it, your body!" A large soprano voice usually unfolds into hymn-like longing amidst the waves of the orchestra.

But Metzmacher uses the so-called Dresden retouches here, with which Strauss adapted the orchestral part in 1929 in such a way that the risk of the vocal parts being covered was reduced.

The Danish-French soprano Elsa Dreisig, who has so far been celebrated primarily as a Mozart singer and made a strong impression at the Hamburg State Opera in the title role of Jules Massenet's "Manon", has now ventured into a highly dramatic role here - and won.

She leads her wonderfully clear voice like an instrument.

Her exclamation "He's terrible!

' she blurts out.

Through her resolute music-making, she is always present;

"éblouissante", gorgeous, as the newspaper "La Provence" writes about her.

Thunderous applause also for the great actress;

her Salome is none

, but a young woman on a fatal wrong path.

Before an open-air opera begins in the courtyard of the former archbishop's palace in the old town, the residents and visitors of Aix already find themselves together in the numerous cafés on beautiful squares with fountains, plane trees and street music.

The perfect Mozart bliss can begin when the last swifts utter their sharp calls to the first notes of the overture before they go to sleep.

The experience with the performance of "Idomeneo", Wolfgang Amadé Mozart's most passionate opera seria, is quite ambivalent.

Raphaël Pichon and the Pygmalion Orchestra are competent, historically informed musicians - is it because of the acoustics that Mozart's revolutionary treatment of the orchestra is too inaudible?

The Japanese director Satoshi Miyagi has worked with myths in Paris and at the Avignon Theater Festival, each of which he combines with Japanese aesthetics.

It is definitely worth seeing, in the local "Idomeneo" aesthetically captivating scenes are created.

For example, he uses a terribly beautiful shadow play for Elettra's fury aria (choreography: Akiko Kitamura).

The stage designer Jenpo Kiz has built platforms about three meters high, which are semi-transparent, filled with warm light and move almost silently on the stage, guided by human hands inside.

These polygonal pedestals — no cubes, no cuboids — serve as a standing surface for the protagonists;

at the same time they raise them high above the people.

The Pygmalion Choir, reinforced by the Lyon Opera Choir, is one of the strongest scenic and musical units of the evening;

he sings and plays with presence, from the anxious "Già regna la morte" (Death reigns) to the joyful final chorus.

However, there is an unexpected reserve in the soloists.

By singing exalted in their own spheres, they do not relate to each other.

The playing inhibition is also reflected in the singing, with Michael Spyres for example, one of the best tenors for the difficult role of the Cretan king Idomeneo, but here a shadow of himself. Elettra (Nicole Chevalier) does a much better job, and the clear, lyrical soprano by Sabine Devieilhe as Ilia with the dreamlike beautiful aria "Se il padre perdei" (If I lost my father too) for a long time.