Aix Fest’s New Ariadne and Fiery Angel Are a Stunning Finale for Foccroulle

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE—Determined to stay young on its 70th birthday, France’s premier opera festival has opened with a trio of modern-dress updates. Simon McBurney’s video-heavy and much-travelled production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte has returned to the Archevêché theater in a well-cast revival. But before that, on July 4, the Festival opened with a brand-new offering from Britain’s Katie Mitchell, a clear-headed interpretation of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. It was a shining success—about which more  anon—yet it was outdone 24 hours later by a very different night of bedazzlement, this time in the imposing Grand Théâtre de Provence, when an ambitious and powerful staging of The Fiery Angel made its debut.

Polish director Mariusz Trelinski has captured the essence of Prokofiev’s sprawling creation, a project that had been close to the composer’s heart since he discovered Valery Bryusov’s novel of the same name in 1919, yet one that still remained unstaged at his death in 1953.

It’s hard to describe or define this strange tale of preternatural obsession: On one level it’s a simple nightmare of obsessive love and delusion; on another it’s a troubling spell of the occult not unlike Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a novel with whose plot it shares a Faustian undertow.

The source tale may be set in 16th-century Germany but its picaresque occult-quest theme is timeless, and Boris Kudlicka’s oppressive and soulless chrome-and-neon 1970s designs feel as alien to the modern spectator as any historical setting.

Mariusz Trelinski's new production of Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel at Aix en Provence

On registering at a bleak hotel, Ruprecht finds an interloper in his room. It is Renata, a young woman who beguiles him by saying that since childhood she has been in love with an angel. This celestial figure guided her through life until the day when she asked him to be her lover. At first the angel blazed with anger, but eventually he consented to return to her one day in human form. Now Renata has become convinced that a man named Heinrich is her angel reborn, and she recruits Ruprecht to help her find him.

American baritone Scott Hendricks had the full measure of Ruprecht’s baffled yet infatuated complexity, although on opening night he was short of vocal power in the early acts. He may have been husbanding his resources, mindful of the storms to come. No such qualms affected Aušrine Stundyte as Renata. The fearless Lithuanian soprano rarely left the stage and she expressed physical as well as vocal extremes with commanding excellence. Had Prokofiev ever worked on a practical staging of The Fiery Angel he might conceivably have adjusted his score to grant this leading soloist a few moments of repose, but that was not to be.

Trelinski’s production is packed with incidental interest. He adds a carnival of silent characters to the stage picture and delivers satisfying moments of audience misdirection in a cunning array of visual tricks. In his hands a dark opera that borders on grim is swept along by an all-important awareness that he has a duty to entertain.

Kazushi Ono’s musical direction was flawlessly idiomatic in a challenging score that must be as fiendish to play as it is elaborate on the ear. The Orchestre de Paris, Aix’s resident orchestra this year and last, appeared to revel in the challenge just as it had the previous evening under Marc Albrecht when playing Strauss’s distinctly more urbane Ariadne auf Naxos.

This curious hybrid—constructed in a prologue and one act—may be a comedy, founded as it is on the contrived premise that a serious new opera and a rumbustious vaudeville must be fused into a single divertissement, but the problem is that Strauss’s music always sounds like Strauss. Jarring mood shifts were not his style. In some productions this musical fusion dilutes the comedy within, but happily the new one delivers theatrical fun as well as a stunning musical experience.

Katie Mitchell’s familiar directorial style harbors a concept that’s characterized by strong women, gender fluidity, and repetitive production tics. The stage represents a makeshift domestic theater owned by a wealthy cross-dressing couple. After the interval the Prologue’s Composer (the American mezzo-soprano Angela Brower, first-rate and for once not required to perform en travesti) stays onstage in a silent role in order to conduct her own opera. A personal dresser is kept busy at one side of the stage (perhaps a nod to Mitchell’s Aix staging of Written on Skin) while Rupert Charlesworth’s tall Dancing Master totters around on stiletto heels. Tenor Eric Cutler is a surprisingly “normal” Bacchus, if such a thing can be said amid such modish chaos.

The opera’s key duo is performed by two of the finest exponents of their respective roles currently working in Europe. Lise Davidsen, like Brower a veteran of last year’s Glyndebourne revival of the opera in the U.K., is a devastating presence as Ariadne. She channels her mellow timbre with sweet-toned beauty yet has decibels to spare in a voice that would bring the house down were the Archevêché not an open-air theater. But why is her character pregnant? Why does she give birth in mid-performance? I was so smitten by the Norwegian soprano’s brilliance that I hardly cared.

As Zerbinetta, the coloratura clown from the vaudeville team, fast-rising Sabine Devieilhe performed the kind of high-flying vocal acrobatics that have become her stock-in-trade, and she did so clad in an electric dress that lit the night sky with a girdle of illuminated bulbs. Devieilhe is a worthy successor to Natalie Dessay, France’s erstwhile songbird of the stratosphere, and she is ploughing a similar repertory furrow.

This season marks Aix-en-Provence’s Belgian-born Intendant Bernard Foccroulle’s farewell to a festival that he has led with flair and imagination for 12 years. During that time the international profile of Aix has soared and its reputation likewise. Next year a stage director of renown and long experience takes over; but, as this current pair of triumphs proves, the French-Lebanese Pierre Audi has a hard act to follow.