Ballets Russes by Stravinsky in Aix-en-Provence. Review

Aix-en-Provence, France hosts the annual Festival d’Art Lyrique, one of the most important opera and music festivals in Europe. Particular attention of the audience is riveted to Klaus Mäkelä, a 27-year-old Finnish conductor who has already risen to the pinnacle of fame and stood at the podium of the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra. From Aix-en-Provence – Dmitry Renansky And Esther Steinbock.

Those who believe the stories about the total “kenseling” of Russian culture in Europe, when looking at the poster of the festival in Aix-en-Provence, cannot but feel deceived: Dmitry Chernyakov directed Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte”, perhaps the main hit of the concert poster – romances by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff performed by Hasmik Grigoryan, and ballets by Igor Stravinsky flaunt in the main program. No, there are no actual dance performances at the festival in Aix – we are talking about music for the ballets The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, a kind of trilogy written by Stravinsky in 1910-1913 for the legendary Russian seasons” by Sergei Diaghilev in Paris.

The festival directorate came up with a special event called “Ballets Russes”: three contemporary French film directors (and, to some extent, video artists) were invited to create a video sequence for Stravinsky’s triptych, which is performed by the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra. The venue for the video-music performance was Vitrolles Stadium, an impressive black concrete box built thirty years ago by the Italian architect Rudy Ricciotti right next to the autobahn between Aix and Marseille.

As for the video, everything turned out a little slurred. Director Rebecca Zlotowski for “The Firebird” re-edited his own feature film “Planetarium” with Natalie Portman in one of the main roles, filmed eight years ago. The strange tale of a film producer consumed by a dream of a ghost he is trying to materialize with the help of two psychic sisters, at least looked beautiful and mysterious on the huge screen – something about life in interwar Europe of the last century. The same cannot be said about Bertrand Mandino’s video tied to Petrushka, in which the world of modern fashion appears as a surreal nightmare, where dance and circus, fetishism and violence are mixed. Evangelia Craniotti’s pagan primordial motives from The Rite of Spring have turned into criticism of the entire modern world, where civilization comes into conflict with nature. In general, the most important moment in the audience’s perception of this evening was the moment when they wanted to stop looking at the screen and finally shift the focus of attention to the conductor.

As a result, the Ballets Russes became almost the central event of the festival precisely thanks to the participation in the project of the 27-year-old Finn Klaus Mäkel, the chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris and the “artistic partner” of the legendary Amsterdam orchestra Concertgebouw, whose post of music director he will take over in 2027. Contracts in both Paris and Amsterdam are designed for five years with the option of extension – in the next decade, Mäkelya will play one of the key roles on the world music scene. The Ballets Russes sounded like an eloquent declaration of intent for him, and at the same time made it possible to understand something very important about where the wind is blowing in European performance today.

At first glance, it might seem that Mäkelä renounces the tradition of conductors-demiurges, dictators-Olympians: the Orchestre de Paris exists for him as a horizontal structure in which the symphonic whole arises from the sum of the individual efforts of orchestra soloists. “Thank you for a wonderful evening of chamber music” – after the premiere of Ballets Russes, Mäkel’s wards could well repeat this historical phrase, once said by the musicians of the SWR orchestra to Sir Roger Norrington after the performance of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The transparent, detailed sound even in The Firebird, with its gigantic late-romantic composition, really reminds of the experience of the “old-timer” conductors, which Myakelya, free from any dogmatism, clearly keeps in mind. However, if we look for direct analogies to his performing style, then, paradoxically, Leonard Bernstein is the first to come to mind – Myakelya is desperately similar to him both in a joyful, ecstatic type of musicality, and architectonic thinking, the ability to make the pattern of connections between parts and the whole extremely clear to the public.

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