The director Pierre Audi died suddenly in May, aged 67. Justice was done to his memory at a Wagner-themed concert and awards ceremony in Stockholm on Tuesday night, when the Birgit Nilsson Prize for 2025 was awarded to the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, where Audi had served as General Director since 2019.
Individuals rather than institutions habitually attract such recognition, though the Birgit Nilsson Foundation already broke with convention in 2014, when the prize went to the Vienna Philharmonic. Bearing a monetary value of $1m – the richest prize in classical music – the award holds both immediate and lasting significance for a festival which depends on private rather than state support for its pursuit of a consistently innovative programming policy.
After its foundation in 1948, the Festival became renowned as a centre of excellence in Mozart. Teresa Berganza was only the most noted of many singers whose careers were launched by Aix stagings of the Da Ponte operas in particular. While the festival’s artistic focus moved with the times, into bel canto repertoire in the 1970s and then contemporary opera, this Mozartian heritage was stylishly acknowledged at the prize ceremony in the Konserthuset in Stockholm, where the Swedish baritone Peter Mattei sang Don Giovanni’s serenade. It was Mattei, after all, who made a matchlessly suave modern Don in Peter Brook’s 1998 production for Aix.
The repertoire for the musical elements of the ceremony otherwise took their cue from Birgit Nilsson’s deserved reputation as the Wagnerian soprano of her age. Even so, nothing in life or art stands still. The opening film of her singing “Dich, teure Halle” from Tannhäuser presented a snapshot of Nilsson in full flood, and a model of nobly projected, steady legato in music which now attracts a wider range of vocal inflection and more nuanced orchestral support. Susanna Mälkki drew springy rhythms from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in the Act 3 Prelude to Lohengrin, and then unfussily sketched in the Wagnerian phantoms flitting through the Excelsior! concert overture by Wilhelm Stenhammar.
Back to Tannhäuser: Mattei sang “O du mein holder Abendstern” with reverential dignity, a performance fit for the King of Sweden seated in the front row where, in other contexts, Wolfram’s song to the evening star would gain from a more flowing pulse. Perhaps it was fitting that vocal honours for the evening should go to a Swedish soprano: Matilda Sterby, last year’s recipient of the annual stipendium (worth SEK250,000/$26,000) which the Birgit Nilsson Stiftelsen also awards to a young singer. Joined by both Mattei and the tenor Daniel Johansson (another previous Stipendium recipient) for the Act 3 finale of Tannhäuser, Sterby unfurled a gleaming top register and a gloriously full tone worthy of La Nilsson herself. On this evidence, her Marschallin at next year’s Garsington Opera presents an enticing prospect.
Sterby presented a more vulnerable, no less compelling side to her artistry in an excerpt from Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence, which Mälkki had conducted at its world premiere in Aix in 2021. The composer’s death in 2023 left another elegiac absence at the ceremony. At a press conference beforehand, Sofi Oksanen paid tribute to the unique festival atmosphere of Aix, as the librettist of Innocence. Words come first, and trust (between partners) is everything: her points were amplified by Sir George Benjamin, whose operatic catalogue was effectively launched in Aix by the premiere of Written on Skin in 2013.
“The experience of collaborating at Aix is akin to operatic paradise,” Benjamin remarked in a speech at the ceremony proper, before paying tribute to Audi and to his predecessor as the festival’s director, Bernard Foccroulle. But this was an evening of celebration, more than commemoration, and it closed with a post-ceremony dinner at which another (unrelated) soprano Nilsson captivated the audience: Christina Nilsson, lately the Metropolitan Opera’s Aida, here a bewitching Swedish nightingale in native song. In the Prize and foundation named after her, and in the broader culture of Swedish opera, Birgit Nilsson’s legacy flourishes.
Peter's press trip to Stockholm was funded by the Birgit Nilsson Foundation.
