morefeo

The Norfolk Chamber Music Festival (my current and, as it turns out thanks to the good news from Darmstadt, very temporay employer) kicked off the summer with a production by the Yale Baroque Opera Project of...you guessed it...L'Orfeo. I think this production could not have been further from what Majel reported went on in Norway, as I think that THIS L'Orfeo was supposed to be in the vein of "historical performance"...judging, that is, by the togas:


(Casey Breves, here, as Orpheus. In the evening performance Birger Radde turned in a very mature, dramatically compelling, and spotlessly enlightened performance...which is to say nothing of his live re-enactment of Schubert's Erlkonig at the afterparty.)

Then there was the ubiquitous harpsichord, the choir of sakbuts and the not ONE but TWO theorbos.

What's a theorbo, you ask? Why here's one now:


(In case the image is too dark, it's basically a giant lute with a 5-foot long fret board)

The production was directed by former Yale-ster, Ethan Heard, and the orchestra was directed olde-timey style by lead fiddle, Robert Mealy. But I don't really want to talk about the production*. It mostly looked like this:



(It didn't really glow red, that's just a byproduct of shooting with a slow shutter speed. The orchestra was below the stage, the continuo was onstage in front of what looked like a wall removed from the dining hall of an Ivy League college.)

*Maybe I should mention a couple things about the production. 1. the staging of Orpheus crossing the River Styx was pretty freakin' awesome...and I'm sad that my camera battery died before that scene came up, so I can't display the awseomness; 2. the continuo group was mindblowing. Bravo continuo players (Grant Herreid, Charles Weaver, Christa Patton, Avi Stein, & Michael Rigsby)! I also liked Charon's costume. If his face had been totally hidden, it would've been perfect:



What I really want to do here is to float that idea that Monteverdi's latent (or blatant - I don't know much about Monteverdi) homo-erotic mysogeny really rears its ugly head in L'Orfeo.

Let's think it through:
1. All the BEST writing in the opera is for male duets. The choruses are lively, but wantonly and disgracefully repetitive. There are, of course, no arias to speak of. The recitative is, of course, famous for being the beginning AND the end of great recitative writing....but the duets are where it's at, and almost all of the duets are for two men. The exception? Pluto and Proserpina, wherein she slyly seduces him into giving Orpheus a chance to save his ladyfriend, Pluto, all the while knowing he will fail.

2. The only really great writing for any female role is for the Messenger (sung gut-wrenchingly stupendously by Annie Rosen) at the announcement of Eurydice's death. Why, here's Eurydice now, doing what she does best:



3. Aside from dying and being Orpheus's dramatic raison d'etre, Eurydice is virtually a non-entity. She sings a little bit at the beginning, shows up dead, then makes a silent cameo in the underworld just before getting sucked back to hell.

4. After Eurydice is sucked back to hell, Apollo (GLORIOUS Apollo!) descends and carry poor, sad, heartbroken, ready for a rebound Orpheus up to heaven with him...without so much as a thought as to Euryidice's fate. He does so after singing what I can only describe as the greatest love duet in the opera...with Orfeo. Love-death indeed.

Here's Lucy Fitz Gibbon as Orpheus's faithful sidekick, La Musica. She was also quite good...although I wasn't so into the magic glowing bauble thing she had to carry everywhere.



And so Norfolk is underway. If anybody reading this is in NW Connecticut in the coming weeks, I STRONGLY encourage catching a show here. The Music Shed alone is worth the cost of admission and a drearily long Act 4. The next two weeks bring new music (programs yet unknown to me), and beyond that, the chamber music for which Norfolk is so famous.

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