Ulisse returns to Aix

Pierre Audi accepts the challenge of restaging Monteverdi's masterpiece at the festival

This is an edited version - free to all subscribers - of my review published by Oper! Magazin on July 22 in Jan Geisbusch’s German translation. It now appears in the original English by kind permission of the Editor, Dr. Ulrich Ruhnke. My reviews of Festival Aix’s productions of Rameau’s Samson, Gluck’s Iphigénies, Madama Butterfly and Pelléas et Melisande will follow next week.

Divine guide: Mariana Flores (Minerva) leads John Brancy (Ulisse) homewards Picture © Ruth Walz

More than a quarter-century ago Pierre Audi, then general director of Dutch National Opera, staged (and filmed) Monteverdi’s penultimate extant opera as the centrepiece of a triptych of the Italian baroque composer’s surviving works for the stage. I didn’t see it until the 2007 revival, when it formed part of a cycle with L’Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea.

Since taking up his appointment as general director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2019, Audi has been more sparing with his time in the rehearsal room than he was during his 25 years in Amsterdam. This new version of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria is only his second staging at the festival (after the world premiere of Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s L’Apocalypse arabe in 2021). Bravely, he chose Aix’s intimate Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, a site where drama of one form or another has been performed since 1660 - 17 years after Monteverdi’s death - and where, in 2002, this opera was memorably staged by the British director Adrian Noble with William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants in the pit.

Memories of that production came flooding back as I headed up the Rue de l’Opéra towards Aix’s oldest theatre. Audi accepts head-on the challenge of staging this wonderful opera anew – for me this is the greatest and most moving of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas – even if his visual aesthetic might not be regarded as cutting-edge Regietheater. With different designers (Urs Schoenbaum, Wojciech Dziedzic) but the same dramaturg (his long-time Amsterdam colleague Klaus Bertisch), his 2024 Ulisse goes for a new simplicity, with abstract sets - dark painted panels opening and closing to make exits and entrances - and timeless, mythical costumes. The tricky scenes involving commentary from the classical deities are set apart by a dazzling vertical fluorescent light which bathes the stage in an ethereal, otherwordly glow.

Father-son reunion: Anthony Léon (Telemaco), John Brancy (Ulisse) Picture © Ruth Walz

Contemporary directors sometimes cut the arguments between Jupiter (Giove) and Neptune (Nettuno) in pursuit of dramatic intelligibility, but in Giacomo Badoaro’s libretto, the character of Minerva is essential to the action, so a ‘supernatural’ element cannot be entirely excised from the dramma per musica. Performing Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria complete is not a viable option, even at a summer festival, but some of Audi’s abridgements, sanctioned by the conductor Leonardo García Alarcón, struck me as baffling. The character of Euryclaeia (Ericlea) was simply dropped, a small but surely crucial part in that she recognises his true identity by a scar on his back. Even more grievous was a substantial edit to the great recognition scene between Ulisse and his son Telemaco, closing the first part of the staging (as it did 22 years ago for Noble and Christie). This has some of the opera’s greatest and most moving music: I found its exclusion incomprehensible.

Even so, the staging is as gripping as any I have seen. Notably lacking in fashionable theatre gimmicks, it zoned in on Badoaro’s text and Monteverdi’s recitar cantando, more vividly brought to life by Aix’s young cast than any performance of this opera I can remember.

Ulisse (Brancy) successfully strings his bow Picture © Ruth Walz

Already in the prologue - in which the figures of Umana fragiltá (Human Frailty), Tempo (Time), Fortuna (Fortune) and Amore (Love) writhe in anguish on the floor as they introduce the end of Ulisse’s journey home - the exceptional vocal quality was evident: these allegorical figures were superbly sung and declaimed respectively by Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian, Alex Rosen, Mark Milhofer and Mariana Flores. All four had co-principal roles in the main action, Bénos-Djian and Rosen as the suitors Anfinomo and Antinoo, Milhofer as Eumete, Flores as Minerva. All possess first class voices that one would want to hear in repertoire beyond the Baroque era, although the counter-tenor (Bénos-Djian) is already a prized specialist in this field. Rosen also deployed his Stygian-toned bass in exemplary fashion as Ulisse’s would-be nemesis, Nettuno, in outstandingly clear Italian.

Indeed the clarity of textual articulation was one of the most striking features of the performance - and not only from native Italian speakers such as Giuseppina Bridelli (Melanto/Fortuna). The entire evening felt like a sung play, as Audi presumably intended, citing the ‘Shakespearean’ quality of  Monteverdi’s opera in a programme interview (a legacy, I suspect, from his early days in London, when he was director of the Almeida Theatre). This is the kind of direct communication and simplicity of gesture which benefits the narrative of Ulisse. Audi makes the valid point that the libretto leaves little room for psychological analysis, particularly of Ulisse himself, whose back-story Monteverdi, Badoaro and their audiences would have known primarily from their knowledge of Homer’s Odyssey.

Warmly sung Penelope: Deepa Johnny Picture © Ruth Walz

García-Alarcón used a musical edition that acknowledges the work of Glen Wilson (conductor of Audi’s Amsterdam staging). For Baroque purists, this is a fairly extravagant edition including sackbuts (notably for the oracular pronouncements of the lower-voiced gods) and recorders, as well as a rich complement of strings. In a theatre the size of the Jeu de Paume a more modest ensemble could have been as effective, but the solo voices were big enough not to be overwhelmed. In this respect Marcel Beekman’s larger-than-life Iro, dressed as a woman with clown’s make-up, made a star turn of his final (suicidal) monologue after Ulisse has slain the suitors, while John Brancy’s virile Ulisse, Deepa Johnny’s warmly sung Penelope and Anthony’s Léon’s plangent-toned Telemaco were among the finest sung I have heard anywhere. Brancy and Johnny sang their final duet of reconciliation with heart-breaking truthfulness. But that was motto of Audi’s potent, if undemonstrative staging.