Monteverdi’s Vespers
★★★★★
Ensemble Pygmalion is the brainchild of French conductor and countertenor Raphaël Pichon. Founded by him in 2006, it consists of a relatively small orchestra and choir – about 20 musicians and 25 singers, some of whom are also soloists – and focuses on performing baroque repertoire using period instruments.
Monteverdi’s Vespers were first published in Venice in 1610 but it’s not known when and where they were first performed, or in exactly what form. They represent a collection of psalms, motets, hymns and a Magnificat that look both backwards towards medieval and early renaissance music and forward towards the baroque.
Pichon has convincingly crafted the work into a single continuous whole, and despite the ornate French Gothic ambience of St Peter’s Cathedral, the Adelaide Festival venue, he emphasised a sense of the theatrical, sensuous and worldly over the sacred or devotional.
This sense of theatre was heightened by the judicious placement of platforms at various levels for the soloists, who were drawn from and moved in and out of the choir in a seamless choreography; soloists, musicians and even the choir itself also moved and sang from various positions around the interior of the cathedral, including the gallery above and behind the audience, so that we were progressively immersed in the work as it unfolded.
Monteverdi’s Vespers was performed by Ensemble Pygmalion at St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide from 2 to 3 March as part of Adelaide Festival.
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Orfeo by Luigi Rossi
★★★★★
Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo was performed a few nights later in the neo-classical grandeur of Adelaide Town Hall by the same Ensemble Pygmalion instrumental ensemble and singers with a few additional soloists; it took things even further in terms of a sense of theatre despite being a concert performance rather than fully staged.
Rossi’s opera was written a few decades after Monteverdi’s version (which bears the same name and was written for the Gonzagas in Mantua) and premiered in 1647 at the court of the young Henry XIV in Paris. It includes more characters (both human and divine) and an extra storyline involving Eurydice’s other suitor (and Orfeo’s jealous rival) Aristeus, and embraces a wider range of moods, including some broad comedy and even a hallucinatory mad scene.
Pichon’s version streamlined things considerably, including some satisfying doubling of roles when we entered the Underworld after interval. Once again, the singing and playing were passionately committed; and once again, multiple levels of staging were used to support the sense of visual storytelling (including one appearance by a trio of Fates in the balcony at the back of the hall).
All in all, Pichon made a convincing case for Orfeo as an unjustly neglected masterpiece – and for the timeliness of baroque opera and music generally.
Arguably, we live in a similar age of transition, moving from a familiar order of things to a new ‘baroque’ era of discord and distortion, absolutism and polarisation, extremism and excesses, schism and chaos, which, like the story of Orpheus itself, has more than one possible ending.
