Sometimes, in an opera performance, you hear the very first notes, you take one look at the stage and you know that you’re about to experience something really special. Such an evening happened on the 23rd July in the Prince Regent Theatre in Munich. Under the baton of Ivor Bolton, musicians from the Bavarian State Opera and the Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble joined an outstanding group of singers in Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo. From the outset, the musicians from the State Orchestra, schooled in historically informed performance, played with precise lightness and delicate transparency.
Ivor Bolton is a frequent and welcome guest at the podium of Munich opera orchestras. He is a specialist in baroque opera and knows more than anyone that interpretation on period instruments with baroque bows and gut strings must never be permitted to sound anaemic. The opposite, in fact: the variety of tone, of decoration and of expressive portamenti that every one of these wonderful musicians conjured up from their instruments turned into a celebration of Claudio Monteverdi’s enormously multi-layered and dramatic score. Amongst all these virtuosi of the State Opera Orchestra, I’m going to single out for special mention the performer of one instrument that one hardly ever takes note of: the tambourine. This so entranced us with dancing lightness and multifarious sounds and tones that you could hardly believe that this is a simple drum with bells.
Director David Bösch’s setting consists basically of an open space, in which scenes are lit in various intense shades of white, grey and black. At the beginning, the ground is strewn with black refuse sacks which, we later discover, conceal giant flowers on long stalks. True to the text, in the wedding of the lovers Orfeo and Euridice in an Arcadian paradise, the flowers rise gently upwards as their stems hang towards the ground. This ingenious trick gives a three dimensional feel to the room throughout the wedding scene, which is transformed in an almost cinematic way into a hippie gathering with its obligatory VW camper van. As the story progresses and Orfeo descends into the underworld, another magical trick follows in the lowest part of the space: simultaneously, the flower stalks are drawn upwards, while pale, flat-faced puppets appear downwards, head first, with deathly grotesque features such as you might see in a horror film. If there can be any criticism of this thoroughly convincing staging, it’s perhaps that the multi-faceted nature of Monteverdi’s musical description is not quite integrated into the staging – for example in the unbelievably dramatic scene in which Orfeo discovers that Euridice is dead. In this way, one might surely be able to depict the conflicted nature of Orfeo with his various emotional battles.