Live from Aix 2011: Acis and Galatea

All in all it’s been a fine opening week for this year’s Aix festival—a good year if not a great one, with some wickedly wonderful stagecraft by William Kentridge for The Nose, two unforgettable star turns—Natalie Dessay in La Traviata, Sarah Connolly in La Clemenza di Tito—and some terrific supporting performances, notably Traviata’s Ludovic Tèzier and Charles Castronovo.

The fifth and final opening of the week, on Saturday night on the tiny outdoor stage of the Grand Saint Jean château outside of town, was Handel’s Acis and Galatea, written in 1718 for the composer’s patron the Earl of Carnarvon. With an English libretto by poet and dramatist John Gay (with possible additions by his colleagues Alexander Pope and John Hughes), the one-act work is based on a fable from Ovid’s Metamorphosis: the divine nymph Galatea’s great love Acis is killed by the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus, but Galatea resuscitates him as a river—the Acis, which flows near Mount Etna in Sicily. While the one-act work may have been dramatized as an opera when given privately for Carnarvon, Handel presented it as an oratorio in public theaters.

It’s become a tradition that one of the smaller Aix productions each year serves as a showcase for a few of the young singers and musicians from the festival’s European Academy of Music. But Handel is not ideal for the young and inexperienced—it usually requires some hard-earned expertise to bring enough variation to the beautiful but repetitive da capo arias.

Although there were a few nice moments—and a lovely, giant “moon” shining through the woods far behind the stage—the charming and earnest young cast on opening night was not entirely up to the job (casts will alternate during the three-week run), and the staging by choreographer Saburo Teshigawara makes matters worse. Since there’s almost no real action in the opera/oratorio and the production is too small to afford dancers to fill in the blanks, Teshigawara keeps the singers in almost constant, swirling motion that is even more repetitive than the arias, making it awkwardly clear that not all singers can dance.

On Wednesday Festival director general Bernard Foccroulle announced the program for 2012 (July 5–27), which will include Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and La Finta Giardiniera; Charpentier’s David et Jonathas by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants; a chamber version of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges; and the premières of two new contemporary operas: Written on Skin, based on a medieval tale, by British composer George Benjamin, who will also direct the wonderful Mahler Chamber Orchestra; and Une Situation Huey P. Newton, by Jean Michel Bruyère and LFKs, comparing the current suburban ghetto of Aix with the Black Panthers of the 1960s.

This year’s festival continues with all five operas in repertory through July 25, along with a roster of concerts and recitals. www.festival-aix.com