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Monteverdi,  L’Orfeo:   Ensemble La Venexiana, cond. and dir. Claudio Cavina, The Moore Theater, Seattle, 8.2.2009 (BJ)


The Early Music Guild and its executive director, August Denhard, put Seattle much in their debt with a three-performance visit by the Venetian ensemble La Venexiana. This was the first US presentation of the ensemble’s production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, perhaps the most popular of the composer’s three great operas, but still a masterpiece honored more often in theory than in actual performance.

So far as the music went, La Venexiana–originally just a madrigal group, but now more ambitious in its repertoire–achieved what might well be called a triumph. Twenty instrumentalists, playing period instruments ranging from the violin family by way of cornetti and brass to organ, regal, and a pair of handsome theorbos, produced incisive sonorities that were rendered all the more delectable by the extreme accuracy of their intonation. And there were some remarkably fine voices on display too, most notably in Emanuela Galli’s rich-toned and stylish impersonations of La Musica and Euridice, Mirko Cristiano Guadagnini’s grandly authoritative Orfeo, Salvo Vitale’s darkly sonorous Caronte, and Matteo Bellotto’s strong and sympathetic Plutone.

Claudio Cavina doubled as conductor and stage director, or rather tripled, for he also unveiled an excellent counter-tenor voice in the role of the Third Shepherd. As conductor, he earned the highest praise, even if perhaps a little more variety in the pacing of the score might have been helpful. I only wish I could be as enthusiastic about his directorial work, but unfortunately this was one of those productions that inflict all sorts of irrelevant frivolities on the long-suffering opera in hand. It wasn’t quite Euro-trash–there wasn’t enough raunchiness to qualify for that description–but my wife was exactly on the mark when she termed it “Euro-kitsch.”

The presentation of the action, without sets but with costumes, on stage in front of the instrumental ensemble was perfectly acceptable, and indeed effective. But the guests assembled for Orfeo’s and Euridice’s wedding, the men sporting elegant grey morning suits and top hats, the women in a variety of no less formal gowns, resembled the shepherds they’re repeatedly called in the libretto about as closely as I look like Marilyn Monroe, and from this inoffensive but ill-conceived beginning it was all, visually speaking, downhill. The implicit updating of the story brought us a Charon dressed like Liberace, and the director’s unwillingness to trust in the perfectly viable story-line to hold the attention of his audience led to all kind of unnecessary stage business. There were song-and-dance routines that had nothing to do with the songs they spoiled, a pointless bit of hat-play in one of the supposed shepherds’ duets, and an infuriatingly distracting addition of TV-style handler when Apollo made his appearance. If Mr. Guadagnini had not been required to sing most of the last three acts in various recumbent postures, his delivery of the superb long “Possente Spirto” solo would doubtless have been as impressive as his singing had been in Acts I and II. There was also a small boy who trotted on and off the back of the stage area at every inappropriate moment–I can’t remember being so annoyed by a small boy since the movie version of Death in Venice, in which I felt that if young Tadzio did his slow turn-and-smile-seductively act one more time I would have to suppress an urge to hurl a brick at the screen.

I must give Cavina the director credit for two truly wonderful ideas. When La Musica stood with her back to Cavina the conductor, so that their two pairs of arms were seen to gyrate in close visual harmony, the relation between creative and re-creative artists was symbolized in the most thrillingly vivid manner. And Charon’s boat-load of strap-hanging souls, four of them, shrouded and masked in ghostly white, was a touching invention in its own right. None of his other visual “inspirations” did anything other than damage to the opera they were intended to embellish–but Monteverdi’s great “fable in music” proved itself strong enough to withstand all the fatuous meddling. Despite so many insults to the public’s intelligence, I think most of us in the venerable Moore Theatre had a wonderful time.

Bernard Jacobson


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