Resurrection of Mahler by Romeo Castellucci: the Festival d’Aix

The Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence opens its 2022 edition with an off-the-walls proposal, within the Vitrolles Stadium, an abandoned black concrete block that has become an artistic installation for the 2nd Mahler’s Symphony thanks to the vision of director Romeo Castellucci:

Romeo Castellucci thus continues, like the second part of a diptych, his vision already worked on at the opening of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2019 with another musical masterpiece that was also not designed for staging (our review of its Requiem of Mozart). After the front-death and the ritual of passage that was the Requiem Mass, he now works after with the Symphony No. 2 of Mahler named Resurrection. But as always, Romeo Castellucci has his own iconoclastic vision of these concepts, and the resurrection proposed here is erased and diverted: anthropologists-forensic experts exhume bodies from a mass grave among the earth (the little noises of their gestures occupying the long silences recommended by Mahler, between the different movements of the work).

Resurrection by Romeo Castellucci (© Monika Rittershaus)

The rigorous work of excavation and identification of bodies accomplishes the resurrection of a humanity, subjected to violence, by a humanity subjected to science. The site is also rediscovered in this show by a mixture of chance, fate and symbolism (by the trainer of a magnificent and rustic white horse), resonating with this place reinvested by the Festival: this Stadium left since 2000 to its state of abandonment, wasteland and squat, tagged and open to the four winds.

Resurrection by Romeo Castellucci (© Monika Rittershaus)

The idea represented here in an obsessive way during the hour and twenty minutes that the performance of the work lasts, thus does not do justice to Mahler’s thirst for spirituality and transcendence (not even to the apotheosis of this symphony ), on the contrary, it brings them back to earth, literally. The bodies, dear to Castellucci, are exhumed from bauxite, red earth formerly extracted from the environment of the Stadium, and laid down with care and love on white shrouds.

Resurrection by Romeo Castellucci (© Monika Rittershaus)

It is therefore the solo and choral voices that give flesh and verb, through the music. The mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa deploys ample consoling notes and delicately deposits her vocal offerings, stamped with resin, on the notes of the horn, warm and low, or the oboe, luminous and celestial. She extracts from her breath a trembling, a vibration, neither too spectacular nor too interior, but enveloping like the epidermal caress of a white shroud. The soprano Golda Schultz opposes it with a more slightly metallic timbre, but which manages to flourish with the help of an ample vibrato, and to look towards the light, in particular during her concertante duet with the choir, in the finale. .

The flights of these two singers making their debut at the Festival are based on the powdery textures of the Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris and the Jeune Chœur de Paris, prepared in depth by Marc Korovitch, located on either side of the phalanx. instrumental (in the sacred Venetian tradition), in the pit as in the limbo of the music to gradually assert itself in colors borrowing from the motet of the Renaissance as from the micro-polyphonies of a Ligeti, with a support, dug in the ground black, from the bass section.

Resurrection by Romeo Castellucci (© Monika Rittershaus)

The musical direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen, a regular at the Orchester de Paris, remains concealed at the front of the pit, like the string desks. Only the wide ribbon of winds, percussion and singers can be admired from the stands. The crowd of the public, as in an oratorio, holds its breath, for fear of profaning the ritual which unfolds, in an insistent and hypnotic way before its eyes. The oppositions of textures, Mahler’s signature, are produced with a skilful dosage, from the granite block of the brass, to the spidery threads of the strings and woodwinds, passing through the eruptions of the percussions. The lines of the harps, sometimes aggressive, are busy, with the conductor, bringing together the scattered desks into an organic whole, with its emphasis, its tremors and its jagged murmurs. The “brass bands”, located behind the scenes, bear witness to the rehearsal work, and still bring to mind Venetian polychoral groups, and more particularly Monteverdi (who will be celebrated in this edition of the festival, with The Coronation of Poppea and Orfeo).

Resurrection by Romeo Castellucci (© Monika Rittershaus)

The public (brought to the scene by a complex and chaotic ballet of shuttles) reserves boos for the director, but drowned out by the applause that alone crowns the musical performance.


See you every next day for all the reports of the productions of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2022, as well as on this page for the audio-visual broadcasts

Resurrection of Mahler by Romeo Castellucci: the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence at the Stadium…