MAGNIFICENT MONTEVERDI
Early Music Vancouver tackles Orfeo
There’s a nice symmetry to it.
On Nov. 3, one of the world’s newest operas premieres at the Downtown East Side’s York Theatre: City Opera Vancouver’s Missing, the tale of missing and murdered Indigenous women along B.C.’s Highway of Tears tragedy put into words and music by Marie Clements and Brian Current.
Just a few days before that, Early Music Vancouver offers a revival of Italian Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo — not, perhaps, the first opera, but nonetheless a landmark piece that helped define just what opera was at the turn of the 17th century and set a course for what opera could become.
Monteverdi’s “favola in musica” (musical fable) is based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was created for Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua and Monteverdi’s employer. Gonzaga apparently heard of some new musical theatre experiments going on in Florence and encouraged his composer to try something similar.
Orfeo first saw the light of day in Mantua’s Ducal Palace in February 1607. It was a hit, and enjoyed multiple productions in the early decades of the century.
But opera in the 17th and 18th centuries was an ephemeral proposition, all about the latest thing in musical fashion. Orfeo had a good run, then languished until musical detectives rediscovered it in the late 19th century. Modern performances resumed in 1911, and it’s been on the boards since.
At the centre of this performance is Stephen Stubbs, leading a complement of singers and musicians from Seattle’s Pacific MusicWorks and San Francisco’s Dark Horse Consort.
Grammy winner Stubbs couldn’t be more committed to the work. During a phone conversation a few weeks ago, he marvelled at how “Monteverdi got it right” by demonstrating both an almost preternatural understanding of how drama and music could be combined, and the various ways words and ideas can be expressed through music.
Stubbs believes Orfeo has a striking musical and dramatic trajectory from beginning to end.
This production adopts the opera-in-concert model: all the wonderful music, but without costumes or sets. Does this matter? Not as much as might be the case with other works, he says.
“Some operas work in concert and others don’t,” Stubbs explains, citing Monteverdi’s later works, The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea (“pieces that could be done as plays”), as operas that demand to be staged.
Orfeo is different, somewhat in the same way a good radio play differs from live theatre, and particularly suited to concert performance since everything is in the score.
The opera also comes from a charmed moment in Monteverdi’s career, more or less contemporary with his famous Vespers of 1610, heard here a few seasons ago. Stubbs notes both works require lavish resources — available at the Gonzaga court but not later in the composer’s career when he was writing for the theatre in Venice.
Stubbs will lead a company of singers — including tenor Colin Balzer in the title role — and period instrumentalists performing in an authentic, historically informed manner, but one aspect of bringing Orfeo to the Chan is a stubborn manifestation of modern practice.
Stubbs notes that recent discoveries about Orfeo’s first performance revealed a ducal entertainment zone in the palace (“a standard Renaissance shoebox room with a platform at one end”) and it played before an invited
audience of just a few hundred spectators. Not conditions easily duplicated today. Not to worry: The Chan Centre can and does work acoustically, even if it is many times larger than the space Orfeo was conceived for.
As the summer 2015 performance of the celebrated Vespers of 1610 demonstrated, Monteverdian splendour and subtlety is quite at home in the late Bing Thom’s splendid space for music. And you don’t need an aristocratic invitation to attend.