Don't look back: Longborough's new L'Orfeo

Longborough Festival Opera’s intimate theatre should be ideal for Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo, first given in a room in the palace at Mantua (not in its theatre). And so it proved for much of the time in Olivia Fuchs’ new production.

The setting is spare. Nate Gibson’s costumes are contemporary casual, and his set is a ramp that swings around a central platform, just above stage level. The platform is surmounted by a large metal hoop, tall enough to act as an entrance or frame to pose under. The four corners of the stage each have a curved metal stanchion, so a lit globe can be suspended from each at the outset.

This space becomes verdant for the joyous opening scene of nuptial preparation, the metal fixings draped in greenery, the simple costumes receiving additions from an onstage dressing-up box, a playful touch for the cavorting celebrants. The setting is regrettably abandoned though for the posthumous appearance of Eurydice. A white sheet forms a new back wall, with medics in white gowns, and the snake-bitten corpse of our heroine is wheeled on, stretched out on a hospital trolley, with drip and monitoring screen. Cue the first of Orpheus’ various lamentations, while a sympathetic medic offers him a seat and a glass of water. Soon after in Act 3, this trolley/bier serves as Charon’s ferry to the underworld. 

Despite the mildly risible aspects to all this, Part 2 (Acts 4 and 5), are well staged, a sepulchral scene where black-draped wraiths crawl around Pluto and Proserpina in more formal black attire. Whether crawling, or dancing and singing, the cast is kept active by Fuchs’ apt direction, except perhaps for a few disco moves when Orpheus becomes a reluctant rock star.

The operatic Orpheus, whether in Monteverdi, Gluck or Birtwistle, has the toughest brief: “just be the most charismatic, irresistibly sweet-toned singer the world has ever heard.” Peter Gijsbertsen’s Orfeo could hardly live up to that but deployed his vocal and histrionic skills well. His tenor is rather baritonal, which suits the tessitura of this role, and he was the most persuasive of any of the singers in his handling of Monteverdi’s intensely expressive melisma. His confrontation with Freddie Tong’s imposing Charon, despite being across that hospital trolley, and having not just to sing the ferryman to sleep but to sedate him, was nonetheless effectively brought off. His closing duet with Apollo, who tells him he overdid both the rejoicing and the lamenting, but still takes him up to heaven, was also very fine, Seumas Begg’s bright tenor contrasting well with Gijsbertsen’s darker sonority.

Eurydice is a rather small part, of which the pure soprano of Aoife Miskelly made the most. Fine singing came too from mezzo Siân Cameron as La speranza (Hope) in Act 3, leading Orpheus to the gates of Hades, where she must leave him. Sung this well, we could hear why he would rather she didn’t leave. Equally touching was the moment when, as in several Classical Greek plays, a key event occurs offstage, so the drama becomes the recounting of the event onstage by a messenger. Our excellent Messaggiera was Frances Gregory, who has witnessed the death of Eurydice, and artfully delays relating this news, building the tension. Later she sang an impressive Proserpina.

But the casting was consistently appropriate, from soprano Caroline Taylor’s La musica at the start to Julien Ségol singing Pluto in his UK debut. In the pit Italian Baroque specialist group La Serenissima was directed by Robert Howarth, whose tempi were all well-judged. The players often add to the drama, such as when Orpheus’ appeal to Charon, “Possente spirto” (Mighty spirit) is punctuated by a succession of instrumental commentaries, from two violins, then two cornetts, then harp, all expertly delivered.

Monteverdi, writing in a form with no template yet in 1607, virtually invents opera and provides its first enduring example. Its theme of the power of art to reconcile us to mortality is compelling, and some knowledgeable opera lovers even claim the subsequent four centuries have not seen its superior. I can’t tell if this production will add to their number, but any well played and sung account of this splendid score should be heard.