PARIS — Every September through December since 1972, Paris has opened its doors to Festival d’Automne, the nomadic, multidisciplinary festival dedicated to innovation. The festival radiates influence. Venues such as La Cité de la musique–Philharmonie de Paris chime in, harnessing the French audience’s voracious appetite for discovery.
At various events over the course of a month, I sat in pitch darkness for Georg Friedrich Haas’ In iij. Noct with the JACK Quartet, squatted on a concrete floor an inch away from sado-masochistic sex scenes in Hèctor Parra’s expressionistic opera Orgia, and slept to Max Richter’s lullabies, with Gerhard Richter’s masterpieces as my bedroom art at the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
With the festival marking what would have been his 100th birthday, Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) loomed large. Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s influence came second, marking 50 years since his violent death, and Spanish opera and theater director Calixto Bieito seems to hold a special residency in the city. From the orchestra desk, there is a distinct sense that we might just be seeing a new golden age for conductors, with figures such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Klaus Mäkelä receiving hero-like worship from both audiences and musicians.
For Festival d’Automne, the New York-based, Grammy-nominated JACK Quartet served as this year’s Portrait artists, a tradition begun in 2012; previous Portrait artists have included Unsuk Chin to Lucinda Childs. Under the new direction of Italian composer Clara Iannotta, the festival appears to offer its artists carte blanche.
The JACK Quartet embraced their pulse for theatricality. In collaboration with fellow American multimedia artist and self-confessed collagist Natacha Diels in Beautiful Trouble, the musicians explored the full breadth of their physical and vocal skills. The five-act work draws attention to the beauty of everyday actions — morning walks, dinners with friends, children’s games, and songs around a campfire. With video playing out as a neon-colored kaleidoscope, the quartet excelled in highly choreographed, spoken-word choruses, quirky seated dance routines, and, in between, playing. A neo-Dadaist influence informs the work’s aspiration to close the gap between art and real life. The work’s calling card is its idiosyncratic originality, but the most striking aspect was the quartet’s precise discipline.
That accuracy carried into their performance of Haas’ 2001 work In iij. Noct, intended to be performed in total darkness by both string quartet and audience. The aim of the work is to recalibrate our visual listening experience. The score is notated with stricto sensu (in the strict sense) notes. The instrumentalists are invited to perform certain gestures and are positioned as far away from each other as possible. The JACK Quartet’s synchronistic execution benefited from their 20 years of music-making. While admirable, the result was negligible. The composer sets a minimum of 35 minutes, but in this case the hour-plus exposition could have concluded at around 45 minutes for the same effect. Our appreciation of extended string playing techniques have relied on the physicality of their expression. When you take that away, the novelty is gone.
Berio’s thirst for exploration in his Folk Songs framed Festival d’Automne’s collaboration with the ever-resilient Ensemble Intercontemporain, under the direction of Vimbayi Kaziboni, presenting works for ensemble and electronics influenced by Berio’s various conceptual visions by Eva Reiter, Sara Glojnarić, Zara Ali, and Ni Zheng. The over-programmed evening suffered under the weight of its length, stylistic diversity, and time-taxing stage management. Reiter’s finely crafted 2012 composition Irrlicht, receiving its Paris premiere, held the most attention with its ability to sublimate electronics with acoustic instruments, creating unique vocal-like textures in its creation of novel instrumental sonorities. In a night of aesthetic polarities, Glojnarić brought explosive rock insinuations to the Paris premiere of Pure Bliss, while Zheng explored darker matter — moans and shrieks in response to her environmental concerns in the world premiere of Cauldron of Mania.
Soprano Sarah Aristidou brought a delicate interiority to Berio’s Folk Songs. Singing while seated, her performance could not have been more different from the extroverted ebullience of Cathy Berberian’s iconoclastic interpretations of this anthology of North American, Armenian, Auvergne, Azerbaijan, and Italian pieces. But Aristidou’s quiet charm and interpretative departure resonated with the audience for its sincerity.
Later in the season, but not part of Festival d’Automne, six of Berio’s iconic Sequenzas were performed by the Soloists of Ensemble Intercontemporain with direction by Bieito as part of the La Cité de la musique–Philharmonie de Paris season. In this staging, and in his direction of Parra’s Orgia that followed the same night, Bieito also explored a neo-Dadaist aesthetic of bringing high art and audiences closer together, drawing on the democratic visitor experience of the art museum. Audiences were able to move, sit, and wander around the six soloists at their discretion.
The performances were meticulously executed, offering diverse insights into Berio’s call for virtuosity: from the academic virtuosity of Sequenza IV for piano (Hidéki Nagano), Sequenza VII for oboe (Philippe Grauvogel), and Sequenza VIII for violin (Jeanne-Marie Conquer) to the more theatrical virtuosities of Sequenza XI for female voice (Jenny Daviet), the clown-inspired Sequenza V for trombone (Lucas Ounissi), and the rhythmic Sequenza XIVb for double bass (Nicolas Crosse), even if the staging objectified the musicians as museum artifacts.
There was nothing repressed about the performance of Parra’s Orgia, his fourth opera and third collaboration with Bieito as director and librettist, which was premiered in 2023 in Bilbao by Ensemble Intercontemporain. Scored for three singers and chamber ensemble, the opera is based on Paolo Pasolini’s 1965 play: a closed-door drama set in a bedroom exploring the sado-masochistic relationship of a man and a woman as a comment on consumerism and conformity. Parra’s expressionistic, lyrical, and sinuous score builds with organic intensity, achieving electrifying music-theater unanimity.
This performance was served by three vital and indefatigable contemporary-opera specialists: Claudia Boyle (Donna), Leigh Melrose (Uomo), and Jenny Daviet (Ragazza), each bringing visceral corporeality with voice and bodies at frankly remarkable levels of commitment. While there is some conceptual finessing to explore in bringing the museum experience to the opera stage, Bieito is seeking to tear down the artifice of the operatic experience and perhaps introduce a new democracy. If there’s a genuine fervor and license for innovation, let it prosper.
