Opera: Monteverdi's Orfeo performed by an early music giant

La Favola d'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi

Sir John Eliot Gardiner, conductor

English Baroque Soloists, The Monteverdi Choir

Krystian Adam, Orfeo

Gianluca Burato, Pluto

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

October 18, 2017

For the past seven months the famed Sir John Eliot Gardiner has embarked on an ambitious road show called “Monteverdi 450”, in honor of the 450th anniversary of the great composer’s birth. He has performed each of the three extant Monteverdi operas as a set, each one traveling with the same cast, in 8 different countries and nine settings, now ending in New York.  After my transcendent experience with a Monteverdi opera performed by Italians last year, this week’s L’Orfeo was a disappointing mixed bag (you can see the entire performance here). L’Orfeo (1607) is the very first opera that entered the repertory, following the beginnings of opera (Dafne and Euridice by the Florentine Jacopo Peri) by about 10 years. Opera in its infancy drew its justification (i.e. why are these actors singing?) from either a mistaken notion that they were recreating sung ancient Greek drama, or by only having characters sing who were themselves musicians, so had a reason to do so. Ergo the choice of Orpheus, whose singing and playing soothed the savage beasts. Monteverdi took this revolutionary idea of a complete story sung to orchestrated music, and brought it to a new level, expanding the orchestra (here 16 strings, organ, harpsichord, harp, 8 brass, recorders) and building virtuosic arioso solos into the performance, providing dramatic contrast with the recitatives that furthered the plot. Monteverdi was a master of the Italian language, using it flexibly and setting appropriate music to it, having refined these skills in writing several books of madrigals. In L’Orfeo he was able to indulge himself with a big, coloristically rich orchestra because of the wealth of his patron, Duke Gonzaga of Mantua. Monteverdi was criticized by conservative musicians of his time for building his works on harmony (“seconda practica”) rather than on Renaissance polyphonic style, but he pushed ahead nonetheless, largely responsible for the transition of music from the Renaissance to the Baroque styles. Part of this was achieved by making words govern the music—in his operas and madrigals, the rhythm and meaning of sentences governs the music, and music and text are tightly integrated. This also led to differing national styles of music, since the English, Italian, French, and German languages have very different sounds and cadences. While this word dominance became neutralized over time, as in the mature Baroque works of Bach and Handel, it was integral to the new music of the early 17^th century. Therefore, a successful performance of L’Orfeo requires acute sensitivity to words. This was only intermittently on display Wednesday night.

The 74-year old Gardiner has been a pioneer in early music performance since the 1960’s, most notably for his “historically informed” performances of Beethoven and early Romantics, and for one of the best complete cycles of the 200+ Bach cantatas. He shares a number of conducting characteristics with Norrington, Hogwood, Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Koopman, and other such peers: attention to instrumental color and balance, stylistic choices defended by early music scholarship, and a willingness to strip away conventions of performance that accumulated over centuries of changing compositional, instrumental and vocal style in order to recapture some of the original sound and style of the piece. On record, Gardiner has often tended towards faster tempos and more forceful performances than some of his peers, often to excellent effect in Beethoven, Bach, and Handel. This caused some problems in L’Orfeo, however. This performance lacked the flexibility and plasticity of the Carnegie Hall L’Incoronazione di Poppea by Concerto Italiano, reviewed last year. The 20-person Monteverdi Choir often sang too assertively and loudly, belting out the choruses in a square style more suited to Elgar at the Proms than to early Italian opera. On the other hand, Gardiner’s overall tempos were slow. L’Orfeo is a five-act opera not easily divisible for a conventional intermission, and such slow tempi made for a continuous performance of over 2 hours, unlikely to be tolerated by an audience of impatient Mantuan courtiers (nor by the fidgety man next to me who could not get his newly replaced knee comfortable). Recitatives and ariosi seemed to lag, and often ground to a halt without a concordant gain in expressiveness. This alternation of aggressive peppy chorus with languid solos made for a bipolar performance that lacked a coherent flow, and made the two hours pass slowly.

Orpheus is the musician who charmed the wild beasts with his voice, loses his new wife to a snakebite, pursues her into Hades, charms Pluto with his singing, then loses Eurydice again when he defies Pluto’s decree that he can leave with her only so long as he does not look back to gaze upon her. Since the myth originally led to Orpheus being ripped to pieces by raving drunken female Maenads (an outcome perhaps inappropriate for a Mantuan wedding feast), Monteverdi’s libretto instead has him ascend to heaven to see his wife in the constellations. The best elements of the performance were the superb English Baroque Soloist orchestra, on its game technically and musically all night, and the superb Polish tenor Krystian Adam as Orfeo. I had not heard him before, and his concurrent involvement in early music and traditional opera served him well. This was no small, reedy or airy “early music” voice. He seemed to draw drama from the intricate solos by using both elaborate ornamentation and a sizable voice, and melded both with a dramatically convincing performance as Orpheus. The opera is symmetrically structured around an extended, elaborate and beautiful central tenor arioso "Possente spirto, e formdabil nume" (Mighty spirit and formidable god"). This was the dramatic highlight of the evening, with all of Mr. Adam's skills on display. Bass Gianluca Burato brought a fearsomely resonant presence to the scary Pluto, and played off Orfeo effectively. The production was semi-staged, with the orchestra on stage and soloists interacting around (and with) the players. The chorus was mainly set behind the orchestra, attired in ugly costumes: men had pastel hip swashes that made them look like fake gypsies in a theme restaurant, and the women wore ill-filling and inexpensive-looking satiny dresses. They attempted some minor movements and choreography, unconvincingly, during the ritornellos and brief dance episodes in the score.

It is fascinating to me that modern composers of operas and musical theater still struggle to justify why the actors onstage are singing. In L’Orfeo Monteverdi provided the first real justification of this concept; subsequent experience teaches us that only the best composers such as he make the unwieldy, unlikely operatic form really work. I was disappointed in this performance overall, especially conducted by such an influential giant of the early music movement. This great early opera deserved a more consistent and integrated performance.