Excerpts from:
Stefano Landi: La Morte d’Orfeo
Monteverdi: L’Orfeo
Giovanni Maria Trabaci: Durezze et ligature
Jacopo Peri: Euridice
Luigi Rossi: Orfeo
Interspersed with:
Lorenzo Allegri: Primo Ballo della Notte d’Amore
Monteverdi: Seventh Book of Madrigals: ‘Tempro la cetra’
Biagio Marini: Per ogni sorte di strumento musicale, op.22 no.21: Sonata sopra ‘Fuggi dolente core’
Alessando Piccinini: Intavolaturo di liuto: Toccata
Sigismondo d’India: Le Musiche: ‘Cara mia cetra’
Andrea Falconiero: Il primo libro delle canzone: ‘Battaglia de Barabaso yerno de Satanas’
Giovanni Legrenzi: La Cetra: Sonata
Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea: ‘Oblivion soave’
Mauro Borgioni (baritone)
Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble
Friederike Heumann (concept, director, viola and lira de gamba)
Founded to enable ‘historically informed’ performances of the three surviving operas of Monteverdi, Munich’s Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble both celebrated its thirtieth anniversary and commemorated the life of one of its founding members, lutenist Fred Jacobs, in a ‘Baroque concert’ contribution to the city’s annual Opera Festival. Gambist Friederike Heumann devised a programme around the idea of the death of Orpheus, in a sense creating a small(ish) concert opera in two acts, rejecting the happy end of so many retellings and exploring not only death but above all the power of music, through assembled texts revealing four protagonists: Orpheus, his lyre (in turn variously represented by harp, lira de gamba, and chitarrone), a narrator, and the ferryman Charon.
At the heart of ‘La morte d’Orfeo’ stood excerpts from three seventeenth-century Orphic operas, by Monteverdi, Stefano Landi, and Luigi Rossi, as well as one from the oldest surviving opera of all, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, written and first performed in 1600. It made for a fascinating evening, poised somewhere between concert and pasticcio, my only real cavil being the lack of titles to enable closer following and comprehension of the words. Yet so vividly communicative were the performances by baritone Mauro Borgioni, who has sung Monteverdi’s Orfeo (and Ulisse) in several productions, and the ensemble as a whole that the loss was mitigated: tribute, in its way, to the power not only of music, but that of its mysterious alchemy in song and in what we have come to know as opera.
In the beginning was an overture: well, not quite, but music that served well in its new guise, Lorenzo Allegri’s Primo Ballo della Notte d’Amore, an ersatz-Sinfonia reflecting in its gathering momentum the interchange between lands north and south of the Alps that has contributed so much to the genre—and perhaps to Allegri’s life and work too, as a composer and lutenist at the Medici court in Florence sometimes referred to as ‘Lorenzino Tedesco’. Dance, we were reminded, in body as in spirit, has informed dramma per musica from the outset. The array of music, genres, and indeed styles that proceeded to feed into the whole reminded us ‘opera’ has, from the outset and arguably from before that outset, always found itself pulled between various poles: words and music, descriptive and prescriptive (even proscriptive), text and performance, and so much else. Sigismondo d’India’s ‘older’, more madrigalian harmony, for instance, registered in such richly expressive fashion that no one could seriously draw a straight line from any point a to any other point b. Indeed, if anything the later seventeenth-music could sometimes sound conventional, even restricted, in various modes of expression compared to what came earlier: Monteverdi, of course, yet far from only him.
Peri’s Euridice stood, probably from
coincidentally, at the centrepoint of the first ‘act’, voice and chitarrone (Michael
Freimuth) opening a window on the world to be joined by their musical
confreres. An ensuing sinfonia from Monteverdi immediately recalled to us why
we consider his Orfeo to be the first operatic masterpiece – it remains hors
concours even without words – but here the rewards in understanding
through so many paths to and from his work and those of Landi and Rossi were manifold. Monteverdi’s ‘Rosa del ciel’
was heart-rending, Rossi’s later lament was more ornate, in what we have come, rightly
or wrongly, to consider more ‘Baroque’ style, echoed in fuller ‘orchestral’
response. Landi’s ‘It’ al sacro consiglio’ was perhaps more generic a setting,
yet still interesting to hear in such context. The ‘Battaglia’ from Andrea
Falconiero’s Primo libro delle canzone gently reminded us that opera is
and always has been theatre too, two of the ensemble having slipped out
returning with their instruments in a dialogue that here began, if only began,
to approach some of our notions of music theatre. Orpheus and his instrument
having travelled to Hades, other humans and their ‘musicking’ could join in
musical sympathy.
For the second, shorter ‘act’, a Rossi passacaglia proved a splendidly apt and contrasting curtain-raiser: in later, more ‘orchestral’ style, yes, but also, more importantly, in dramatic mood. Landi’s narration, ‘Volge Orfeo gli occhi’, showed his artistry to more individually expressive effect, at least to my twenty-first-century ears, than the previous excerpt from his 1619 tragicommedia pastorale; here, perhaps conditioned by what had gone before, I found his simpler writing more allied to the later century and arguably in better company. Harp (lyre) music in both halves by Giovanni Maria Trabaci soothed the soul and furthered the action. For Orpheus’s farewell, Rossi and of course Borgioni rose magnificently to the occasion; no one could have entertained any doubt about what was happening and about to happen. A trio-instrumental treatment of the lullaby ‘Oblivion soave’ from L’incoronazione di Poppea, cornetist Gebhard David’s line rocking atop and against its continuo, worked its magic in winning new guise, prior to a splendidly theatrical change of mood for Charon/Caronte’s ‘Beva, beva secure l’onda’. This was Landi in festive mode, its strophic form nicely varied in Borgioni’s ornamentation and, of course, the Ensemble’ response.
As an encore, the thwarted happy ending
returned: again, emblematic of a key theme in the history of the genre.
Borgioni and the players treated us to a solo rendition of the closing ‘chorus’
of L’Orfeo, ‘Vanne Orfeo felice a pieno’. Orpheus reborn once again: where
should we be without him?
