Document

  1998
    October 1998
        Opera
                Monteverdi L’Orfeo.

Monteverdi L’Orfeo. Victor Torres (bar) Orfeo; Adriana Fernandez (sop) Euridice; Maria Cristina Kiehr (sop) La Musica, Speranza; Gloria Banditelli (contr) Messenger; Antonio Abete (bass) Caronte; Roberta Invernizzi (sop) Proserpina, Nymph; Furio Zanasi (bass) Plutone, Shepherd IV; Maurizio Rossano (ten) Apollo; Gerd Turk (ten) Shepherd I; Fabian Schofrin (sngr) Shepherd II; Giovanni Caccamo (ten) Shepherd III, Spirit I; Salvatore Sutera (sngr) Spirit II; Ensemble Vocal Studio di Musica Antica Antonio Il Verso; Elyma Ensemble / Gabriel Garrido.

K617 (Full price) (CD) K617066 (two discs: 110 minutes: DDD). Text included. Recorded in association with Comunita Mondo X di Erice Vetta.

Selected comparison:

Jurgens (11/74R) (ARCH) 447 703-2AX2

Garrido’s reading of Orfeo is dramatic, lively and committed, and it is well served by a carefully chosen and well-matched cast. Gloria Banditelli almost steals the show with her highly coloured portrayal of the Messenger’s fateful announcement which dramatically and effectively shifts the mood from pastoral bucolic to tragic. On the grounds of vocal timbre I am less convinced by the choice of a baritone, Victor Torres, for the title-role, but his singing of “Possente spirto” is controlled and neatly phrased, the passagework clearly articulated and only occasionally showing signs of strain. Nevertheless, for all its technical command the result lacks the necessary passion and detailed understanding of the style of this crucially central episode in evidence, for example, in Nigel Rodgers’s first recording under Jurgen Jurgens. The chorus work is generally deft in the first one-and-a-half acts, where the speeds are brisk and the accents strongly marked even to the point of being mannered, but a little ragged at the end. The sound is also overweight, inevitable perhaps, given the size of the group, which ideally should be restricted to one or at most two singers to a part.

And so to the thorny question of orchestration. Monteverdi’s score is notoriously difficult to interpret in this respect, since its indications are at various times imprecise, vague and even contradictory, a reflection of its main function as a piece of Mantuan cultural propaganda rather than something to be used in performances elsewhere. The instruments listed at the beginning are reminiscent of the forces often called for in the sixteenth-century intermedio tradition, and yet more are added in the course of the score itself. Garrido has taken this as a cue for a richly varied approach that maintains drama and verve while following Monteverdi’s implicit division into underworld and arcadian ensembles backed by appropriate continuo instruments. The result, even if the instructions in the score have sometimes been taken as generally indicative rather than definitive, is convincing. Less so is the decision to add ornamentation (and a great deal of it at that) to instrumental lines, even when they are accompanying. Here Garrido’s stance is very reminiscent of Savall’s, but to my mind it is unjustified and unsatisfying since it both lacks the authority of the score (which in this respect is surely quite precise) and has the effect of gratuitously muddying the clarity of Monteverdi’s crystalline textures.

IF



		Garrido’s reading of Orfeo is dramatic, lively and committed, and it is well served by a carefully chosen and well-matched cast. Gloria Banditelli almost steals the show with her highly coloured portrayal of the Messenger’s fateful announcement which dramatically and effectively shifts the mood from pastoral bucolic to tragic. On the grounds of vocal timbre I am less convinced by the choice of a baritone, Victor Torres, for the title-role, but his singing of “Possente spirto” is controlled and neatly phrased, the passagework clearly articulated and only occasionally showing signs of strain. Nevertheless, for all its technical command the result lacks the necessary passion and detailed understanding of the style of this crucially central episode in evidence, for example, in Nigel Rodgers’s first recording under Jurgen Jurgens. The chorus work is generally deft in the first one-and-a-half acts, where the speeds are brisk and the accents strongly marked even to the point of being mannered, but a little ragged at the end. The sound is also overweight, inevitable perhaps, given the size of the group, which ideally should be restricted to one or at most two singers to a part.



		And so to the thorny question of orchestration. Monteverdi’s score is notoriously difficult to interpret in this respect, since its indications are at various times imprecise, vague and even contradictory, a reflection of its main function as a piece of Mantuan cultural propaganda rather than something to be used in performances elsewhere. The instruments listed at the beginning are reminiscent of the forces often called for in the sixteenth-century intermedio tradition, and yet more are added in the course of the score itself. Garrido has taken this as a cue for a richly varied approach that maintains drama and verve while following Monteverdi’s implicit division into underworld and arcadian ensembles backed by appropriate continuo instruments. The result, even if the instructions in the score have sometimes been taken as generally indicative rather than definitive, is convincing. Less so is the decision to add ornamentation (and a great deal of it at that) to instrumental lines, even when they are accompanying. Here Garrido’s stance is very reminiscent of Savall’s, but to my mind it is unjustified and unsatisfying since it both lacks the authority of the score (which in this respect is surely quite precise) and has the effect of gratuitously muddying the clarity of Monteverdi’s crystalline textures.