COSI FAN TUTTE - REVIEW OF 2023 AIX-EN-PROVENCE FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

 Reviewed by James Karas

If you are going to the opera and notice that what you are about to see is directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, tighten up your seatbelt because you may be in for a rough ride. The rough ride could be thrilling or whatever the opposite of thrilling is that will cause you to boo, metaphors aside, the production that you actually see.

I speak of the current production of Cosi Fan Tutte at the former residence of the Archbishop of Aix-en-Provence, now called the Theatre de l’Archevêché.  Cosi was the first opera to be produced at the Aix-en-Provence Festival when it opened in 1948 and there can be few people who attended that performance and attend this year’s showing but sometimes historic nostalgia is as important as actual memory.

As to the plot of Cosi, we all know that with some variations we have the beautiful sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella who, with their maid the feisty Despina, live in a mansion in Naples overlooking the harbour.

They are deeply, madly, eternally in love with Guglielmo and Ferrando and we know that because they tell us that it is the absolute truth. The latter gentlemen feel exactly the same way about the ladies, and they are willing to put their lives or whatever to dispel any doubts about their devotion. But their friend, the cynical and wise philosopher Don Alfonso (I think that’s what he is) is willing to make a bet that all women are capable of infidelity and that is confirmed by the title of the opera.

Wanna bet? Yes, they do. Don Alfonso “sends” the men to war, and the same men disguised as Albanians are brought to the ladies’ posh residence by him. The ladies do not recognize the newcomers who woo them with passion and conviction. My impression has always been that the two beauties are very nice but not very swift. Leave to Mozart’s music to overwhelm you and suspend your disbelief.

 

The two couples near their beds. Photo Monika Ritterhaus

What does Tcherniakov give us. Forget most of the above. Two middle-aged couples are, in Tcherniakov’s words, “in a fancy villa in the forest or perhaps a chalet in the mountains.” The set shows a sitting area with an ordinary table and six chairs with two inviting bedrooms with big beds behind but let’s not quibble about that.

The two couples make use of the bedrooms during the overture and when the opera begins, we discover that they are Guglielmo and Fiordiligi, and Ferrando and Dorabella with Don Alfonso and Despina. We already saw Don Alfonso molesting, yes, sexually interfering with Despina’s anatomy, but she seemed to participate in the encounter after some resistance. We will see more of Don Alfonso as a dirty old man.

But right now, our attention is riveted toward the lovers who are past the bloom of youth and are in fact in their fifties. I take the liberty of assuming that whatever they were doing on those beautiful beds was not for the first time.     

The holiday in the forest or in the mountains takes place now and the men and women are dressed in modern clothes so there is no eighteenth or nineteenth century prudery. Guglielmo and Ferrando as the presumed Albanians of the original production appear in modern clothes with masks which they quickly take off and even Mozart’s gorgeous music is asking too much of us to suspend our disbelief. Where are those mustachioed and overdressed Albanians when you need them?

The pervert and the maid. Photo: Erika Ritterhaus

The middle-aged men and women re-discovering love and passion with a different partner and the women tasting infidelity may not have the same stigma that it did, say, 250 years ago. But Tcherniakov does not stop there. Despina with a blonde wig looks like something out of a Marx brothers’ movie but her relationship with Don Alonso may not be as consensual as we would like to think. They engage in simulated coitus in front of our eyes that is not all bad except that we do not expect the elder philosopher Don Alfonso to be such a dirty old man.

Pervert Don Alfonso kisses Ferrando and Fiordiligi on the lips quite seriously. A shotgun is introduced early in the performance and as in a Chekhov play, it is eventually used on stage.

I have spoken at great length about Tcherniakov, but the performers deserve much credit. True they are all in their fifties (except for Nicole Chevalier whose date of birth I could not find). But, even if they stumble now and then, they do superb work.  They are baritone Russell Braun as Guglielmo, soprano Agneta Eichenholz as Fiordiligi, tenor Rainer Trost as Ferrando, mezzo Claudia Mahnke as Dorabella, baritone Georg Nigl as Don Alfonso and soprano Nicole Chevalier as Despina. The Balthasar Neumann Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock plays Mozart’s music with incredible beauty and finesse.      

Directors pushing the envelope to produce operas in different locations with radical interpretations, especially in Europe, is nothing new. In fact, the last time Cosi was produced at the Aix-en-Provence Festival was in 2016 directed by Christophe Honoré. He set his production in a slum in a village in colonial Africa. The director was roundly booed.

This time the reaction at curtain call was mixed. There are boos no doubt but also applause of approval. I admire Tcherniakov’s work, and I would never boo his brilliant inventiveness and imagination. One can legitimately say that he may have gone too far with his inventiveness in this production but isn’t that the reason we want to see what he has in mind?

__________

Cosi Fan Tutte continues at the Théâtre de l'Archevêché until July 21, 2023 in Aix-en-Provence, France.  http://festival-aix.com/

James Karas is the Senior Editor- Culture of The Greek Press. This review appears in the newspaper

THE THREEPENNY OPERA – REVIEW OF 2023 AIX-EN-PROVENCE FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

 Reviewed by James Karas

The Aix-en-Provence Festival is in its 75^th year and from the 4^th to the 24^th of July 2023 the gorgeous medieval city in the south of France becomes a mecca of cultural activities from productions of opera, ballet, concerts, and lectures to keep one occupied almost constantly.

The Festival opened on July 4 with a new production of The Threepenny Opera that featured some amazing features. It is done in French in a new translation by Alexandre Pateau in an adaptation by German man of the theater Thomas Ostermeier who also directed the production. L’opéra de quat’sous (four sous) is the French title of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 collaboration. The production is supposed to be faithful to the 1928 text with the addition of a new song, “Pauv’ Madam Peachum” with text by Yvette Guilbert, adapted by Pateau.

In an innovative step, the production uses actors from the Comédie-Française instead of conventional opera singers, and Le balcon, a band of about a dozen musicians playing a variety of instruments under the direction of Maxime Pascal.  

Most people know something about The Threepenny Opera. It is a product of the moral and financial morass of the 1920s Weimar Republic Berlin. It is not an opera in the conventional sense, of course, but a parody that attacks private property, capitalism, morality, the bourgeois, the justice system and gives a frightful portrait of life in the slums of London. Crime, corruption, prostitution are the milieu of the work. It is based to some extent on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.

Ostermeier takes an idiosyncratic approach to the opera by producing it partly as a concert version and partly as a fully performed work. This is no doubt a bow to the theory of epic theatre. More about that in a minute.  When the performance begins, we see four microphones prominently displayed on the stage.  Claina Clavaron sings “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” about the demi-monde of the opera and the anti-hero and preeminent criminal Macheath. otherwise known as Mac the Knife in a style resembling a 1920’s cabaret performance. 

Scene from Threepenny Opera. Photo © Jean-Louis Fernandez

From then on, the singing and the dialogue part of the opera will be performed on the microphone or by the characters interacting in the usual way in the theatre. The choice to have actors speak on the microphone rather than interact with the other characters in the scene is the choice of director Ostermeier. This is no doubt an attempt at giving us the then nascent idea of Brecht known as epic theatre, an attempt to treat a play as if it were the recitation of an epic poem rather than an attempt at realistic representation. This is not the place for an essay on epic theater but that idea and Brecht’s dedication to Marxism were not fully developed in 1928.

The Threepenny Opera is, despite its name, a play with songs and therefore has a lot of dialogue between sung numbers. The actors of the Comedie-Francaise spoke it, in various speeds as required by the text. Those without a facility for French dialogue at a certain speed (like moi) could not read the English surtitles with any appreciable speed. But I am sure there were few such types.

After the Ballad we get down to business in what is supposed to be a London slum but there is no indication of that. We start with the disgusting Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Christian Hecq), a portly gentleman who is the boss of the beggars. He trains and outfits them at their cost and collects 50% of their “earnings.” This may be the original franchise method of doing business. Peachum has a “lovely” wife and partner called Celia (Veronique Vella). They have a pretty daughter called Polly (Marie Oppert) who, horrors, wants to marry some low-life and yes, it is Macheath himself played by a suave Birane Ba.

In the next scene we attend the nuptials of the happy couple with a collection of criminals and Chief of Police Brown (Benjamin Lavernhe). What follows is a scene of slapstick comedy with pies (cake really) thrown at people in a scene reminiscent of The Three Stooges. In true epic theatre style, the actors get down on their knees and clean up the mess made by the cakes when the party is over.

The production continues in the same style with Peachum’s desire to have Macheath arrested and Brown protecting him. They were army buddies after all. There is treachery, bribery, and ballads like the one about sexual obsession, melodrama, the song of Solomon and others.   

The sets by Magda Willi are minimal with no hint of London slums. The action takes place during the coronation of a queen, and you can decide a more precise chronology for that but don’t bother. There are video projections by Sebastien Dupouey of geometric figures and black and white photographs and film clips but I could not make head or tails of them. Florence von Gerkan’s costumes were modern but colourful to portray some of the low-lives and hookers of the underworld.

The actors of the Comédie-Française performed with assurance and aplomb from slapstick comedy to more serious scenes and especially comic ones of satire, parody and ridicule of society as well as betrayal, arrest and almost execution of Macheath. In case you forgot the end of the opera, rest at ease. Macheath is pardoned by the newly crowned queen and made a lord.

There are some lyrical songs and the assorted musicians of Pascal’s Le Balcon performed with gusto.

The Threepenny Opera has gained a sure-footed niche in modern culture with some of the songs like The Ballad of Mack the Knife that have gained honourable status. The work has posed difficulties in classification. There is no need. Opera houses and theatres are producing it on a regular basis, and no one should care about classification.

______________

The Threepenny Opera (L’opera de quat’sous) by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill opened on July 4 and will be performed on different dates until July 24, 2023, at the Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Aix-en-Provence, France. www.festival-aix.com/

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press. This review appears in the newspaper