A brilliantly cruel Cosi and punkish Petrushka but the Brits disappoint: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence reviewed

Aix is an odd place. It should be charming, with its dishevelled squares, Busby Berkeley-esque fountains, pretty ochres and pinks. Yet none of it feels quite real. It’s as if an AI bot had been asked to design a Provençale city. Everything is suspiciously perfect. And then you notice all the Irish pubs and American student clones. It’s the prettiness of a Wes Anderson set – with the charm of an airport. In this uncanny valley, however, lies what continues to be one of the world’s classiest opera festivals.

The major new commissions this year were two British chamber operas. George Benjamin and Martin Crimp were returning with Picture A Day Like This, their third collaboration for Aix. It’s another medievalish fable, a quest: a mother has lost her son and must find someone truly happy in order to revive him. She hunts down one charmed archetype after another – lovers, artisan, art collector, gardener, composer – and in each case discovers that life’s not so rosy. It’s a circling, see-sawing narrative – plotting alla rondo – that becomes predictable quite quickly.

Benjamin is clearly happier, and compositionally more interesting, when in destruction mode, and conducts those passages where musically he has to bash in the windows – fast-bowling clarinets or brass through panes of sound – with relish. Much less convincing is his attempt to paint bliss – though the wobbling eddies on recorder come close. As always with Crimp and Benjamin we’re missing something. A convincing foundation. A generosity of expression. The result is that the opera’s climaxes never felt earned, despite the vocal generosity of the mother Marianne Crebassa.

The other new chamber work, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, by Philip Venables and Ted Huffman, a musical lecture on queer history, was far less precious but no less flawed, melding experimental, pell-mell theatricality – musicians and singers all mucking in – with found bits of folk and the Gebrauchsmusik style of Eisler and Brecht.