2023-08-08 20:30:09
From left to right: Andrè Schuen, Sabine Devieilhe and Adriana Gonzalez, in “The Marriage of Figaro”, at the Salzburg Festival, July 29, 2023. MATTHIAS HORN
A room that rises for the conductor, after having acclaimed the singers: this is the dream lived on Saturday August 5 by Raphaël Pichon, who made his debut in the lyrical pit of the Salzburg Festival with The Marriage of Figaro. The French musician was all the more expected as his reputation was built with his Pygmalion ensemble, which plays on period instruments. Admittedly, it was in recognized Mozart that he was chosen – as evidenced by the concert given in 2018 at the Mozarteum as part of the Mozart Matinees, before the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), where he led The Magic Flute (2018) then Idomeneo (2022). But this time he is at the head of the prestigious Wiener Philharmoniker, an orchestra whose extreme requirements have already ruled out certain batons, even if they are listed.
Read the review: Article reserved for our subscribers At the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Mozart’s “Idomeneo” caught in the trap of the Japanese debacle of 1945
A phalanx of luxury which has its Wolfgang Amadeus, to the point, it is claimed, of being able to play it almost without score, obliged to sacrifice this famous Viennese sound which characterizes it, to give the music Wedding a striking vivacity, this content of subversion that Mozart and his librettist knew how to put to music so well. Nervous tempos, capricious as well as loose strings, winds with insolent verve (these horns which symbolically sound the trumpet as soon as the count fears being cuckolded), supple and voluble phrasing, modeled on the dramaturgy of the text: the Mozart of Raphaël Pichon is lively, young, daring. And that obviously pleases the musicians, who seem to have a field day.
Director Martin Kusej summoned a barbaric world to the stage. The protagonists are frozen in front of the idyllic bucolic pastiche of Albert Rieger, A summer evening near Florence, when the twirling opening of the opera begins, the return of the initial theme of which will trigger their sudden animation, everyone sniffing, injecting or swallowing drugs and alcohol. Between night bar (where Figaro no longer counts the measurements of his future nuptial chamber but the number of glasses ingested) and rows of empty rooms or shady spaces (emergency stairs, trash room, garage in the basement), these Wedding are those of a mafia clan quick to settling scores. Two shots and the fall of a man in tailcoat running down the steps: the count appears, weapon in hand, followed by a Don Basilio in a cassock, a henchman in charge of the rapid disappearance of the corpse.
Labyrinth of glass cages
The transposition could remain anecdotal if Kusej did not make it the manifesto of an ontological solitude. Life is like a mad dash in a wheeled suitcase, without the rest of even a bed or a chair. Of course, the count thigh and pencil case at will while the countess in a fur coat aspires, in front The origin of the world, de Courbet, to rediscover the love of this man who forsakes her. Of course, this tall scoundrel Figaro (ultraviolent, with a psychopathic Nicolas Cage look) will do everything to marry Susanna, who feels more sensually attracted to the Count than she cares to admit. Everyone can in turn become prey or hunter. And it’s a beating in order that awaits poor Cherubino, caught in the act of marivaudage, badly beaten by Basilio and Figaro. Likewise, the gardener Antonio, tied up in the basements for questioning, or the bloodbath that threatens the final scene of Act II.
You have 53.27% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
#Salzburg #Festival #brilliant #barbaric #Weddings