Festival International d'Art Lyrique d'Aix en Provence logoAix's Festival of Lyric Art is a cultural highlight in Provence and its open-air performances in the balmy midsummer nights are magical occasions. The dates of the 2024 Festival are 3-23 July.

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The Director of the Festival international d'art lyrique d'Aix en Provence - to give it its full name - is the French-Lebanese stage director Pierre Audi, who presided over his first edition in 2019. His contract has been extended until 2027.

Monsieur Audi is known for his progressive productions at the Dutch National Opera, which he led for three decades. He has left that post to focus on the Aix Festival, but continues in another of his roles, as the Artistic Director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Click here for the website for the Festival d'Aix.

The previous Director of the Aix Festival, from 2007-2018, was the Belgian organist, composer and opera director Bernard Foccroulle, who built up a reputation for bold and often challenging work. He is now concentrating on his own writing and performances.

Aix also has a packed programme of concerts. And, just to keep the music going all summer, the city has more mini music events in June and August: Aix en Juin, Les Nuits Pianistiques and Musique dans la Rue. In addition to all this, Aix's Festival de Pâques (Easter Festival) is becoming increasingly important.

THE FESTIVAL D'AIX IN 2024

wolfgang amadeus mozartThe 2024 programme for the Festival d’Aix opens with a double bill: Iphigénie en Aulide and its later companion piece, Iphigénie en Tauride, by Christoph Willibald Gluck.

The operatic line-up also includes Samson, by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Pélleas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy, Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini and Il Retorno d’Ulisse in Patria by Claudio Monteverde.

The traditional work by Wolfgang Amadeaus Mozart, pictured, comes as a semi-staged concert performance this year: it’s La Clemenza di Tito. Also being staged in a concert version is Giuseppe Verdi’s Les Vêpres Siciliennes.

As usual the festival is not just about the great classics. There are pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies and György Kurtág, and an intriguing new production by the South African multi-hyphenate William Kentridge.

This is called The Great Yes, The Great No and tells of a group of refugees (including Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton) fleeing the Nazis in 1941 on a boat from Marseille. The Great Yes, The Great No is being staged in Arles, at the LUMA complex.

Click here to read about the Aix Music Festival in 2014, in 2015, in 2016, in 2017, in 2018, in 2019, in 2021in 2022. and in 2023. The festival was cancelled in 2020.

Insider Tip for the Aix Music FestivalThe Festival d'Aix has a reputation of being aimed at a moneyed elite, and there's certainly some truth in this. Ticket prices for the flagship opera productions can easily run to several hundred €uros.

However there are also plenty of free and very low-cost spectacles, and discounts for young music-lovers.

A further offshoot of the aim to broaden the Festival's audiences are projects to transmit some performances live by satellite to regional and international venues, as well as to stage others outside the centre of Aix.

And if you are in Aix outside the main Festival dates, don't worry about missing out. Since 2013 the city has held a curtain-raising event, Aix en Juin, which offers a programme of some two dozen concerts and masterclasses throughout June.

Parades free promenade concert in Aix en ProvenceAimed at locals but open to everyone, many of these are free. The hottest tickets here are the free full rehearsals of the operas in July's main Festival programme. Book very early indeed if you hope to attend one of these.

The concerts are held both in the city centre and at atmospheric locations all over the surrounding area, including the Fondation Vasarely and the beautiful Abbaye de Silvacane.

Aix en Juin reaches its climax with Parade[s], a very popular - and free - open-air promenade concert, pictured, on the Cours Mirabeau, at the end of June or beginning of July just before the start of the Festival d'Aix proper. Click here for the full programme for Aix en Juin.

Soon after the main Festival ends there's yet more music. A programme of piano concerts by top international performers, Les Nuits Pianistiques, starts in early August. Modestly priced, they're at the city's new music academy building, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud. Website for Les Nuits Pianistiques in Aix en Provence.

Musique dans la rue smallAnd, just to prove it's not over till it's over, Aix manages to pack in one last little music festival before the end of the summer.

Also organised by the Conservatoire, Musique dans la rue (Music in the Street) is a series of free open-air concerts all across town in the early evening at the very end of August.

All kinds of sounds are represented from baroque and classical to jazz, rock, world music and Latin vibes.

Logo Aix Easter FestivalAnd serious classical music fans will want to make a diary date for another top-flight celebration in the city: the annual Festival de Pâques (Easter Festival). In 2023 it runs from 31 March-16 April.

Under the artistic directorship of the violinist Renaud Capuçon, this event, first launched in 2013, has very quickly gone from strength to strength.

Thanks to continuing sponsorship from the CIC bank, it already attracts artists of international calibre and is expanding its activities into venues all across town. Click here for the website of the Aix Easter Festival.

A THUMBNAIL HISTORY

The first Aix Festival took place in an extraordinary cultural landscape. France was on her knees in the aftermath of the Second World War and fighting to regain her identity and self-respect with a stream of prestigious new arts events.

The Cannes Film Festival was created in 1946; Avignon followed in 1947. And in 1948 Gabriel Dussurget, a music enthusiast from Paris, joined forces with Countess Lily Pastré.

This remarkable woman had sheltered dozens of dissidents, mainly Jewish musicians and artists, at the Château Pastré, her estate in Marseille, during the war.

 

After the war Dussurget persuaded the wealthy Countess to finance an opera and classical music festival in Aix, then a lovely but quiet backwater known as the region's Sleeping Beauty.

The Festival d'Aix at the Archbishop's PalaceThe opening performance took place on a tiny stage in the great open-air courtyard of the former Archevêché (the mediaeval Archbishop's Palace, pictured) next to the Cathedral in the Old Town of Aix en Provence.

It featured a German orchestra (Südwestfunk), an Austrian conductor (Hans Rosbaud) and an opera, Cosi fan tutte, by another of Hitler's countrymen, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The line-up created a minor scandal. But there could be few more beautiful ways of celebrating the healing and unifying power of music, and WAM has been a cornerstone of the Festival ever since.

Sets and production designs from past festivals are on display in the Musée des Tapisseries within the Archbishop's Palace.

Today, for over three weeks each July, the Festival d'Aix still takes over virtually the whole city, forming a quartet of midsummer arts festivals in Provence alongside the prestigious, if more mainstream Chorégies d'Orange (opera and classical music), the Festival d'Avignon (theatre) and the Rencontres d'Arles (photography).

The Archbishop's Palace remains the iconic venue for the Festival d'Aix, but it also spills over to many other locations, from the Grand Théâtre de Provence, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume and the Hôtel Maynier d'Oppède to the place des Quatre Dauphins in the Mazarin Quarter and even the Cours Mirabeau.

The beauty and variety of settings on offer are one of the Festival's most potent attractions. Added to that, the compactness of the inner city lends an intimacy to the event.

Robert Lepage's production of The Nightingale in AixNumerous international figures have appeared at the Festival d'Aix, including Peter Brook - who directed a memorable Don Giovanni there in 1998 - the dance choreographer Pina Bausch and the conductor Simon Rattle.

Among the guests in recent years have been the Canadian Robert Lepage, whose remarkable, waterlogged production of Stravinsky's The Nightingale, pictured, was a highlight in 2010 and went on to tour venues worldwide.

Other artists who had successes at the festival include Robert Carsen, also from Canada, South Africa's William Kentridge, Britain's George Benjamin, Katie Mitchell and Simon McBurney and Peter Sellars from the US.

 

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

The Festival d'Aix is based at the former Archevêché (Archbishop's Palace), place de l'Ancien Archevêché, 13100 Aix en Provence. Website for the Festival d'Aix. Telephone, if calling from abroad: (+33) 4 34 08 02 17. Telephone, if calling from within France: 08 20 92 29 23.

The full Festival line-up is available to view online on in late January and tickets go on sale online, by phone or at the Archevêché itself at around this time.

The Festival d'Aix offers several special packages, such as a free child's ticket for every accompanying adult at certain shows. Check the Festival website for details of what's on offer this year.

booking.com logoClick here to book a hotel in Aix en Provence

Accommodation is at an absolute premium during the Festival, especially if you are planning to be in Aix on or around Bastille Day (14 July), which is a public holiday in France. Be sure to reserve well in advance. AirBnB is always an option too, of course. Click here for tips on where to stay in Aix en Provence and here for tips on where to eat.

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