Live from Aix 2011: Thanks To My Eyes

The 63rd annual Lyric Arts Festival in Aix-en-Provence got off to a slow and strange start last night with the world premiere of a newly commissioned contemporary chamber opera, Thanks To My Eyes, in the city’s little jewel box Jeu de Paume theater.  Sung in English, the short, 75-minute work is a first stab at opera for both the Italian-Swiss composer Oscar Bianchi and French playwright-director Joël Pommerat, who condensed the libretto from his own play, Grâce à Mes Yeux.

It’s an odd choice to open this most prestigious of France’s summer music festivals, especially since the rest of this year’s operatic program is so juicy: Verdi’s La Traviata, with star soprano Natalie Dessay singing the role of Violetta for the first time in Europe; David McVicar’s new production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, with Sir Colin Davis conducting the London Symphony Orchestra; South African artist William Kentridge’s staging of Shostakovich’s satirical comic opera The Nose (first seen last year at New York’s Metropolitan Opera); and Handel’s Acis and Galatea, staged by Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara.

For the enigmatic Thanks To My Eyes, it was the composer’s choice to use an English translation rather than the original French as the basis for the score, but the result is a stilted compromise in which the lyrics dissolve into a series of detached, almost meaningless, falsely split syllables—sounds rather than words.

The story is a mysterious fable, related in 24 brief scenes punctuated by blackouts: Living on an isolated mountaintop somewhere between heaven and earth, young Aymar is destined to follow in the footsteps of his famous father, who was once the world’s most celebrated comedian, but the young man doesn’t seem to have the right stuff. While his aged mother keeps working to remake the father’s glittering stage costume to fit their son, Aymar is visited at night by first one and then another young woman who may or may not be real—and one of them reveals that the father may never have been what he pretends to be.

Played by a 12-instrument chamber orchestra, the music is a fairly predictable series of noises—tweets, pops, clicks, dings, trills, thumps and a few nice bell chimes. But the up-and-down-the-scales vocalizing is done by four strong, agile and beautiful voices—Scottish bass Bryan Bannatyne-Scott as the father, Israeli soprano Keren Motseri and Welsh soprano Fflur Wyn as the two young women, and the extraordinary German counter-tenor and baritone Hagen Matzeit as Aymar.

On schedule for tonight: La Traviata, with Natalie Dessay, Charles Castronovo as Alfredo, Ludovic Tézier as Germont, and Louis Langrée conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, in the outdoor courtyard of the 18th-century Episcopal residence that is the magical, signature setting of the festival. www.festival-aix.com

Check in for our daily coverage of the Aix festival through Sunday, July 10.