Aix-en-Provence Festival

Dedicated to the creation of new opera productions and the organization of high-quality concerts, the Festival enjoys great renown, permitting it to join forces with stage directors at the height of their art, visionary orchestras and conductors, first-class casts, and the greatest contemporary composers around. Thanks to its reputation, it engages in coproductions with the finest opera houses in the world, which continue to welcome the Festival’s productions throughout the seasons.
The international Festival in July is preceded by Aix en juin, a prelude that caters to local audiences and is entirely free, thereby reinforcing bonds in the region, another of the Festival d’Aix’s important roles.
In addition, the Festival is also known for its dynamic Académie, renowned the world over, and its European network of opera academies, enoa; its vibrant Mediterranean projects, which it supports through the Medinea network and the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée; and the powerful awareness-raising initiatives and creative projects of Passerelles, an educational and socio-artistic programme that welcomes over 5000 participants every year.
Committed for several years to a Non-Profit Social Responsibility (NSR) policy, the Festival was awarded two Afnor labels in 2021 for its continued support of both ‘Gender Equality in the Workplace’ and ‘Diversity’. It received the Best Opera Festival award from the German magazine Oper! in 2022; as well as from the International Opera Awards in 2023, thus honouring the Festival’s 75th anniversary edition.


Each annual Festival programme has its own identity. Two main styles give each its colouring: French, in that it allows us to hear refined French prosody from Rameau’s Samson to Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande, by way of Gluck’s Iphigenias; baroque, in that it bends its elegant bow from Monteverdi’s The return of Ulysses to his Homeland to Mozart’s The Clemency of Titus – also engaging with the trinity that dominates 18th-century opera and lays down the bases of modernity: Rameau, Gluck and Mozart. We also celebrate Puccini in the centenary of his death; as we do music theatre, with a fascinating double bill of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments. We also include The Great Yes, The Great No by the wonderful William Kentridge, performed at LUMA Arles.


This edition is marked by confidence in orchestras and their musical directors, in exceptional stage directors and interpreters, working together in artistic adventures that are for the most part original – such as Samson, a free creation based on a lost opera by Rameau and a censored libretto by Voltaire, or the programming together of Gluck’s Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris, allowing us to appreciate in a single evening the whole tragic destiny of the above-named princess.

As well as partners of long standing such as Raphaël Pichon and the Ensemble Pygmalion, Daniele Rustioni and artists from the Opéra de Lyon, or Leonardo García Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea, the Festival is delighted to welcome back Emmanuelle Haïm and the Concert d’Astrée as well as the Ensemble Intercontemporain and its new music director Pierre Bleuse. Dmitri Tcherniakov, Claus Guth, Andrea Breth and Barrie Kosky come with new proofs of their unique talent – as does Katie Mitchell, whose already historic Pelleas and Melisande we wanted to revive, conducted this time by Susanna Mälkki. The violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, a star who played for us in 2021, is now one of the main artists in Songs and Fragments.

Great voices of today are especially feted this year. So we can enjoy first visits from Ermonela Jaho, the great Butterfly of our time.