The Aix Festival cuts Mozart to pieces

Special correspondent in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône)

After a few hours of sleep, we're still not sure what we witnessed. The annual Mozart of Aix 2023, Cosi fan tutte, will remain a borderline experience. It's not so much about Dmitri Tcherniakov's staging, although it's obviously her that sparked the public's ire. She will even remain the best of the evening, without being the most accomplished of the brilliant Russian director. True to form, he turns Cosi into a camera where the characters act out a psychodrama. Starting point: in a modern bourgeois interior (very Claus Guth in Salzburg), Don Alfonso and Despina are an old couple between attraction and repulsion (very Michael Haneke in Madrid), who manipulate the protagonists to bring to light the cruel disenchantment of their vision of love (like all the Cosi for twenty years).

Clever concept: they are, not young people but older couples who have come to have a swinging experience, a nice way to dodge the question of disguise, impossible in an era that refuses theatrical conventions. Tcherniakov does sometimes trip over the carpet, and he goes hard when the wife of this pessimistic Eyes Wide Shut kills the perverse husband, but it remains a proposition that forces you to shift your gaze, without deserving boos programmed anyway .

On the other hand, the fact that the public has, no doubt to restore the balance, given an ovation to the conductor and the singers plunges us into perplexity. Because they were part of the experience of deconstruction, which is what this Cosi is about. In order to stick to the story, we had indeed bet on a cast of veterans, some of whom had long since abandoned these roles, all under the direction of Thomas Hengelbrock, with his Balthasar Neumann ensemble playing on period instruments, at a difficult pitch. to identify.

These untimbral voices, short of breath, devoid of line and lacking in agility, cannot be an incident along the way: there was indeed an intention, of which we are not sure to have grasped all the extensions. Desynchronized voices in the ensembles, due to the erratic tempi of a conductor whose orchestra sounds in an evanescent way, with winds that we had not heard squealing like this since the rediscovery of ancient instruments fifty years ago .

Just as we had not heard Italian sung with a German accent since the 1950s, Don Alfonso speaking his role like Schönberg. As we began to torture our body and mind wondering what this alternative sound installation was about, the rain began to fall, interrupting the show for an almost liberating quarter of an hour while accentuating the surreal side of this lunar evening.

Perhaps a demonstration by the absurd that it is now the baroque, modern and contemporary repertoires that are the living identity of the Festival d'Aix, and that Mozart is no longer good there except for the dissecting table. It would then be time to take a break with Mozart's operas...

Archdiocese Theater at 9:30 p.m. until July 21. Broadcast on France Musique on July 12 at 8 p.m.