A Brilliant Opera Season at Aix-en-Provence

Lisa Hirsch surveys the 2026 Festival d'Aix-en-Provence for San Francisco Classical Voice and calls it a season matched almost nowhere else this year. The festival is now run by the American director Ted Huffman, who took over after the unexpected death of Pierre Audi last year. The centerpiece was the world premiere of Francesco Filidei's "Accabadora," after Michela Murgia's novel. Set in Sardinia, it turns on the bond between a woman named Bonaria and Maria, the girl she adopted at six from an impoverished mother. Bonaria is a skilled seamstress and also an accabadora, "she who finishes," a figure from Sardinian folklore called to the bedside of the dying to end their suffering. Murgia was to have written the libretto, but she died of cancer at 51 before it was finished, and Filidei wrote his own. The festival also staged Hans Werner Henze's "El Cimarrón," a monodrama drawn from the memoir of Esteban Montejo, born into slavery in Cuba in the late nineteenth century, who lived until 1973. The Venezuelan bass Iván García performed it. Barrie Kosky's staging of Strauss' "Die Frau ohne Schatten," conducted by the 30-year-old Klaus Mäkelä, who becomes music director of the Chicago Symphony next year, was for Hirsch the most persuasive account of that opera she has seen. Mäkelä's concert performance of Bartók's "Bluebeard's Castle," by contrast, she calls among the dullest opera performances of her life. Verdi's "Les Vêpres siciliennes" under Daniele Rustioni was another peak, and Sonya Yoncheva's recital with Cappella Mediterranea a pure delight. On Michael Spyres' recital she was more divided.