Simon McBurney stages a brilliant, shattering Wozzeck at Aix Festival

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Soldiers dump a mound of rubbish into Marie’s bare room. Her child rummages frantically through it, checking crumpled crisp packets for any remaining morsels. There are none. Marie collects the trash carefully into a bag which she then uses as a pillow.

Later, when the narcissistic Tambourmajor has been and gone, when Marie has examined the sparkling earrings she won from this transactional sex, the child stands outside their door with a new, full packet of crisps, and eats. He, too, has won something.

This is just one of the hundreds of tiny, heartbreaking details in Simon McBurney’s brilliant new Wozzeck for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Along with George Benjamin’s pithy Picture a day like this, it makes a fitting 75th anniversary present for France’s biggest opera festival, an institution which has pushed boundaries as much as it has maintained the status quo since 1948. When current Aix intendant Pierre Audi hired McBurney to direct Alexander Raskatov’s A Dog’s Heart in Amsterdam 13 years ago, they created something that was almost a new genre; Audi remains one of the only people for whom McBurney is willing to invest the time it takes to make opera.

This Wozzeck is direct, descriptive and stupendously well crafted. The stage is generally bare, with three concentric revolving circles, sparingly used. Paul Anderson’s lighting is dark yet alive; Christina Cunningham’s costumes suggest the mid-20th century, but only vaguely.

Leah Hausman, the choreographer, is credited with “collaboration” on the stage direction and you can see why. The chorus is augmented with dancers, but it is impossible to tell one from the other; the entire evening is a kind of dance, a fluid tangle of limbs for the crowd scenes, set changes that melt from one image to the next by a kind of mystical alchemy. Not a split-second, not a gesture is wasted, and we move with clockwork inexorability through the harsh poverty, social cruelty and casual sadism that drive Wozzeck first to murder, then suicide. 

Simon Rattle conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Alban Berg’s score as if all of them were born to do this; every note matters, every phrase is shaped with a keen sense of both grotesquerie and lyricism, and climaxes are shattering. From the first moment, you feel the screw turn.

Christian Gerhaher is Wozzeck. Every syllable, every nuance is there, infused with the weary melancholy of exhausted suffering. Malin Byström is a stage animal, a Marie who craves more from life but knows herself doomed. Peter Hoare’s horrid Hauptmann and Brindley Sherratt’s sinister Doktor are exquisite villains. McBurney gives the Hauptmann a young son, who wears a military uniform like his father’s and apes his brutal gestures; it is he, not Wozzeck’s son, who sings the final “Hop, hop!”, prodding the boy just as his father prodded the man. The cycle will continue.

★★★★★

Brutality also infuses Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new Così fan tutte, which opened the night before Wozzeck in Aix’s beautiful Théâtre de l’Archevêché; but by the time the performance was interrupted by rain, well into its second half, it came as a welcome relief.

These are two completely different forms of despair, McBurney’s steeped in primal love for its unfortunate characters, Tcherniakov’s bathed in sharply observed cynicism. The 2022 Danish horror film Speak No Evil is a nightmare account of a couples weekend gone horribly wrong. Perhaps Tcherniakov saw it. Certainly his Così fan tutte echoes its catastrophic sense of a deadly game, the bitter consequences of what can happen when civilised self-doubt meets elemental bloodlust. Tcherniakov presents us with two middle-aged couples in an upscale mountain chalet, encouraged by their anarchic friends to indulge in a wife-swapping experiment.

There are few revelations. Modern productions have long since assumed that the two women see through the “disguises” of each other’s husbands, that Don Alfonso’s “experiment” is an act of ruthless barbarity, that there is no happy end. Tcherniakov just dials up the viciousness. It doesn’t help that Thomas Hengelbrock’s conducting is erratic and imprecise. His singers sound exhausted, with Agneta Eichenholz’s Fiordiligi suffering audibly from the leaden tempi. Nicole Chevalier plays a furious Despina, caught in a mutually abusive union with Georg Nigl’s twisted, superbly expressive Alfonso. The soloists sing marvellously as an ensemble, but the arias drag. 

Disappointingly, the rain stopped and the opening night ground on to its remorseless conclusion. Tcherniakov and his team were roundly booed by the damp public. Perhaps unjustly — we all know that Così fan tutte is a callous story. But Mozart’s music is suffused with affection for his characters, and Tcherniakov seems to have missed that fact. Without the tension of that dichotomy, the inexorable nastiness becomes a little boring.

★★★☆☆

Both to July 21, festival-aix.com