2023-07-11 17:00:07
“Ballets Russes” at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, July 7. JEAN LOUIS FERNANDEZ
While it was re-opened for the opening of the previous edition in Aix, the Vitrolles Stadium (Bouches-du-Rhône), a cube of black concrete built by Rudy Ricciotti, is hosting this season the sixth and last show scheduled for the 75 years of the demonstration. The proposal is intended to be spectacular, which also revisits the symphonic repertoire performed, as in 2022, by the Orchester de Paris, no longer under the star baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen but under that of another Finnish conductor, the young director musical of the Parisian phalanx, Klaus Mäkelä.
After the Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”, by Mahler, place for Stravinsky’s three Russian ballets – The Firebird, Petrushka et The Rite of Spring –all created in Paris by Serge de Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company, chronologically in 1910 at the Paris Opera, in 1911 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, the performance of « Sacre » in 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées causing one of the most resounding scandals in the history of music.
Dance has given way to the image, from choreographers to videographers, whose films counterpoint music now most often programmed at symphonic concerts around the world. But, in principle, nothing shocking. Projected on a large screen in the background, Planetarium (2016), by Rebecca Zlotowski, opens the triptych with Fire Bird. The film, the shooting of which was accompanied, she said, by the “Lullaby” stravinskyan, before the awakening and then the death of the wicked sorcerer Kotcheï, who still retains knights and princesses, finally delivered by the tsarevich Ivan and his Bird of fire.
Sacrificial dimension
On the Russian tale and its musical quest, the screen unfolds in snatches the story of two American spiritualists, the sisters Kate and Laura Barlow, and a famous film producer of the 1930s, André Korben, whom they put in relation to a ghost, an experience he seeks to capture on film. Neat aesthetics, plunged into the underworld of the night and art, refinement of elegant toilets, the beauty of Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp explodes at every moment while Emmanuel Salinger casts his esthete look of great melancholy on a world of which he does not sense the warmongering danger. Despite its undeniable charm, the relationship between the score and its visual “projection” will not manage to emerge from the usual film and soundtrack duo.
Read the review: Article reserved for our subscribers At the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the brilliant and subversive “Cosi fan tutte” by Dmitri Tcherniakov
Roughly similar observation for the third film, devoted by Evangelia Kranioti to Rite of Spring. The Greek videographer, in the resonance of her first documentary released in 2015, Exotica, Erotica, Etc., evocative of the relationship between sailors and prostitutes, has brought back from all continents magnificent sequences of celebration of nature. She also denounces urban violence and the terrible fate reserved for the underprivileged. Like these tightrope walker migrants sleeping on the concrete embankment of a highway, these drowned people in carnival clothes floating in the Big Blue.
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