Annually the Early Music Guild brings in stellar groups of period musicians from across the world and recently has been presenting a Baroque opera every other year. This season it married the two with the weekend’s presentations of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo, favola in musica” performed by Ensemble La Venexiana from Ialy.
Given the fabulous production of Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” EMG mounted a couple of years ago, it was reasonable to expect this “Orfeo” would be of the same caliber but alas, it was not to be.
Like “Poppea,” “Orfeo” was updated to modern times, but the switch from a rural environment to a sophisticated urban one with champagne and top hats plus a bit of vaudeville slipped in didn’t work. The costumes were a mishmash of an English garden party at Buckingham Palace, a fashionable nightclub, a couple of outfits from Liberace’s closet, and a thrift store wedding dress. La Venexiana put the orchestra of 20 players seated in risers on the Moore Theatre’s stage with the performers restricted to the small remaining space in front.
None of this would have mattered if Venexiana had really acted out the opera and done it well, but acting was amateurish for the most part and good stage direction seemed minimal.
Granted, “Orfeo,” from 1607, was the very first work we regard as opera, the pioneer of the genre, and it can be played as a collection of set pieces. But it doesn’t have to be. I saw it at Skylight Opera in Milwaukee in 1988 in a very lively production. By the time Monteverdi wrote “Poppea,” 35 years after “Orfeo,” he had developed the style further, but two years ago, Seattle’s Theodore Deacon took that and ran with it, creating an action-filled and very funny opera which riveted the eyes as well as the ears.
La Venexiana’s musical performance, however, was mostly excellent. Conducted by Claudio Cavina, (who occasionally turned round and joined the action with his countertenor voice), the ensemble of sackbuts, cornettos and recorders, strings and harp, organ, harpsichord and chittarones (great bass lutes) made the most of Monteverdi’s glorious music.
1607 was almost the last gasp for the cornetto, the curved wooden pipe with an oboelike timbre. It had been a prominent instrument, occupying the place the violin does today-St Mark’s in Venice had a cornetto choir which played antiphonally from either side of the cathedral-but a plague decimated northern Italy including many of the cornetto players around 1620-30, just at the time when the violin was coming to the fore as a useful instrument. The cornetto never regained its former glory.
Hearing the very individual sound of the cornettos in La Venexiana makes one realize what a loss that was.
Of the singers, the performance was carried by the Orfeo, Mirko Cristiano Guadagnini, who had by far the most prominent role and the most expressive music. This is a baritone with many shades of nuance to his voice and the ability to convey emotion through it. Salvo Vitale as Caronte, the Boatman, was a pleasure to hear with his rich bass. The women used vibrato more continuously than we usually hear today in Baroque singing, though all the singers ornamented their arias perfectly in style, efortlessly executed.
Perhaps this presentation of Orfeo would have been more successful had it been simply a concert performance, so that the music could be heard in all its beauty without distraction.
The third of Monteverdi’s extant operas, “The Return of Ulysses” is also being performed at the Moore this spring, March 11-21. It’s the U.S. premiere production of Stephen Stubbs’ Pacific OperaWorks, with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa directed by William Kentridge. www.pacificoperaworks.org
Philippa Kiraly
