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Fateful Lust for Love: Don Giovanni and Les pêcheurs de perles in Aix-en-Provence

Aug. 24, 2025

An affectionate libertine and two sworn friends took center stage in Aix-en-Provence. This year’s festival explored human desire and the resulting destructive power towards a beloved partner. The festival opened on July 4 with probably the most cunning womanizer in the operatic repertoire – Mozart’s Don Giovanni– in a new production directed by Robert Icke and conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. This was followed by Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles, performed in concert on July 19 with Marc Minkowski and his Musiciens du Louvre. This three-act work captivates with its brilliance and its sparkling wealth of ideas, although the source material is extremely challenging, as scores exist with different endings, only one of which is by Bizet. The Bärenreiter/Alkor edition presents the opera in the form which Bizet composed, but with some sections newly orchestrated based on the vocal score and the violin conducting score.


Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2025: Trailer

To learn more about Bärenreiter/Alkor's excellent edition of Les pêcheurs de perles, and other operas in their acclaimed critical edition series, visit baerenreiter.com.

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