This profoundly moving, brilliantly staged and impeccably
performed rendition of ‘L’Orfeo’ is just what jaded London opera – goers
need after some of the offerings with which they have been presented
this season. Go on, you know you can do it; a quite decent seat may
be had for 31 Euros (that’s around £19) you can get there on Eurostar
for £69 weekend return, and a room at the Hotel Opéra, literally
steps away, costs 73 Euros (£48) – total £136, which is £2 under the
Royal Opera’s price for a goodish seat to see the current ‘Trovatore,’
and I won’t even go into the possibilities Brussels offers for chocolate
– and – waffle guzzling and beer consumption.
Critics, too, are far from immune when it comes to
being jaded, and this production served to remind me of what it’s all
supposed to be about; I was fortunate to attend two performances, the
standards of both surpassing anything else I’ve seen so far this season
in terms of staged opera (I except Les Arts Florissants’ ‘Il Ritorno
di Ulisse’) and that of the second touching heights of glory such as
most of us are only rarely privileged to encounter.
The Toccata’s ‘silver, snarling trumpets ‘gan to chide’
from the equivalent of the Royal Box, setting the scene for a production
in which Trisha Brown contravenes virtually every unwritten rule of
the staging of this opera, beginning with the stunning rendition of
the Prologo, usually seen as a set piece of stand -and - deliver in
which La Musica prepares us for the story of the great singer whose
power could move all nature. Here, the black - clad Sophie Karthäuser
(who also took the roles of Euridice and Eco) sang from the pit as though
she really were part of the ritornelli, and the nature of Music itself
was enshrined in the person of a flying dancer (there really is no more
accurate phrase for what she was) who moved with incredible grace and
fluidity, her supporting wires and occasional guiding hands barely visible,
sometimes suggesting the power of Music to go where she will, and at
other times evoking the guardian presence of the little ‘Putti’ figures
seen in frescoes by artists such as Mantegna.
Ronald Aeschlimann’s designs and lighting were based
largely upon the striking use of a circular sun / moon / planet shape
and showed a wonderful empathy with the director’s concept. Set against
the backdrop of a limpid moon, this was the first of many stage pictures
which were as moving representations as I have ever seen, yet it did
not exist only in the abstract, for it is part of Brown’s genius as
a director that she is not only unusually intimate with the narrative
but also with the text and the music; at the line ‘Non si muova augellin,’
(let no birds even flutter) the figure dropped sheer from the top edge
of the ‘moon’ to the bottom, then becoming utterly still – magical.
The Pastoral scenes evoking the joys of Hymen and Nature,
so often verging on the cringeworthy, were here danced and sung with
grace and commitment; what a joy to experience the effortlessness of
highly trained dancers, their gestures so exactly evoking the emotions
underlying the music. The sequence and patterning of their movement,
now lush and yielding, now harsh and angular as required, evoked what
Brown has called ‘ the myriad form and shapes of things,’ and was nowhere
more eloquent than in the beautifully crafted management of the characters
of Orfeo and the Messaggiera.
How to combine the functions of singers and dancers?
A monumental challenge, but somewhat less daunting when Orfeo is enshrined
in the graceful presence of John Mark Ainsley, already widely recognized
as ‘the’ Orfeo of our time. On the first night, I felt that he and one
or two others in the cast were somewhat affected by nerves, manifested
in an occasional reluctance to sing out, but by the third performance
such wholly understandable problems had been forgotten, and he gave
a stunning rendition of the part, as remarkable for its fluent movement
as it was for its exquisitely tender and virtuosic singing. Ainsley
immersed himself totally in this difficult role, bringing it off triumphantly
even in the extremely demanding movement and gesture; Trisha Brown told
me later that she had been thrilled with his assumption of it because
he not only understood what she wanted, but ‘gave so much of himself.’
Surely, one might say, it’s quite enough to have to
launch your voice into something like ‘Ecco pur ch’a voi ritorno’ without
having to leap onto the stage like Nijinsky the second before opening
your mouth; in such circumstances, where does the required amount of
breath come from? The easy answer is, of course, prodigious technique
and dedicated training, but here so much more was in evidence, since
it was clear that singer and director were absolutely in step; the empathy
was transparently obvious, and Ainsley’s movement was constantly as
masterly and confident as his singing. A production of this opera stands
or falls on the man who hardly leaves the stage after his entrance,
and this Orfeo held us all spellbound with his poetic ‘Rosa del Ciel,’
his alternately heart – rending and wilful ‘Ma tu, anima mia,’ and of
course most obviously his ‘Possente spirto.’ This virtuoso aria must
represent the most demanding nine minutes of any singers’ life, and
whilst it would create totally the wrong impression to say that Ainsley
sang it with careless ease, it was abundantly clear that its incredibly
florid lines held no terrors for him.
It is often forgotten that ‘Possente spirto’ is not
just a plea from the great ‘Cantor’ to the grim Caronte, but a depiction
of all-too-human arrogance and hubris as well as godlike pride, and
here both singer and director had understood this and were able to encourage
us to follow Orfeo’s progression from confidence in his great art, through
touching sincerity in his plea, to overblown rhetoric. Ainsley’s voice
is extremely beautiful in itself, but it is always used in the service
of the text rather than as a vehicle for mere display, and his singing
of lines such as ‘Mia cara sposa il cor non è piu meco….’ gave
almost as intense a pleasure as that to be gained from his astoundingly
controlled ‘A lei volt’ ho il cammin……’ in which the extremely long
line was taken without a single breath to break it up. As Monteverdi
wrote to Striggio in 1616, Orfeo moves us because he is a man, not ‘just’
a singer or a semi-God, and there can be few more sympathetic interpreters
of the role than this tenor. A great performance.
Ainsley was not, however, a brightly lit figure against
which all the others were mere
shadows, since he was supported by an outstandingly
musical cast and playing of the greatest polish from the Concerto Vocale
under René Jacobs, whose forthright, sometimes earthy style,
especially in the Ritornelli, reminded us of the vernacular traditions
of this opera as well as its lyrical beauty. Sophie Karthäuser
sang with elegant phrasing, lovely tone and sweet musicianship, as did
Topi Lehtipuu and Lorenzo Carola as the Pastori and Stephen Wallace
as Speranza, and very strong vocal characterizations were also provided
by Henry Waddington’s Plutone and Paolo Battaglia’s Caronte.
Laura Polverelli’s Messaggiera was simply the finest
assumption of this central role that I have ever experienced. Noble
in bearing and dignified in presence, she has a lovely, warm, shapely
mezzo, beautifully even from top to bottom, wonderful diction and thrillingly
confident phrasing, and her bitter lines evoking Silvia’s anguish at
how she has had to ‘pierce the loving heart of Orpheus’ represented
some of the most purely moving singing I have heard for a very long
time. This is a singer of whom I hope to hear a great deal more.
In conclusion, perhaps just one brief scene will give
some idea of the experience of this production, and it is the moment
when the Messaggiera gives Orfeo the terrible news. Accompanied with
wonderful simplicity and economy of gesture, the phrase ‘ e morta’ falls
upon the air with devastating force, and Orfeo’s reaction is an astounding
moment of theatre – instead of whispering his ‘Ohimè’ and either
collapsing in a heap or holding his head in his hands, here his whole
upper body seems to crumple as the word comes from his lips and its
import seems to go back into his consciousness, and you are made to
see the grief falling through every part of him; it is a moment of visceral
drama which made me gasp aloud, as did the subsequent highly charged
departure from the stage of the Messaggiera, and Orfeo’s incredible
final posture of deepest sorrow, his entire body tortuously yet somehow
gracefully contorted into an emblem of shattered anguish. Tremendous.
Melanie Eskenazi
Return to:
Music on the Web