Welcome to simonkeenlyside.info - <strong><font size="4">L'Orfeo: London, June 1998</font></strong>

Title	L’Orfeo. Favola in Musica
Composer	Claudio Monteverdi..
Text	Alessandro Striggio, after Ovid
	..

Venue and Dates	Barbican Centre, London 3, 4, 5, 6 June 1998 ..
Conductor	Rene Jacobs
Director/ Choreographer	Trisha Brown
	..
Performer(s)	Orfeo (tenor) : Simon Keenlyside (3, 5) / Carlo Allemano (4, 6) .. Euridice/La Musica/Eco (soprano) : Juanita Lascarro .. La Messaggiera (soprano) : Graciela Oddone .. Proserpina/Ninfa (soprano) : Martina Dike .. La Speranza (contralto) : Stephen Wallace .. Plutone (bass) : Tómas Tómasson .. Caronte (bass) : Paul Gérimon .. Apollo (tenor) : Mauro Utzeri .. Ninfa (soprano) : Anne Cambier, Martina Dike Pastori, Spriti : Stephen Wallace, René Linnenbank, Paul Gérimon, Yann Beuron, John Bowen .. Dance Ensemble, Trisha Brown Company ..


Production	Roland Aeschlimann (sets and costumes). .. Co-produced by Festival des Arts, International dArt Lyrique d’Aix-en-Province, Trisha Brown Company, Brooklyn Academy of Music



Label	Offered by House of Opera: http://store.operapassion.com/index.html

What the critics say

The Times, June 3 1998

With the hoofers in Hades

Simon Keenlyside tells Hilary Finch about an all-dancing L’Orfeo

The rehearsal schedules had changed yet again. Calf muscles had been torn. And the sackbuts of Hades were tuning morosely in the royal box. The healing power of Orpheus and his lute certainly seemed to be blocked. But then a full moon rose, and a man fell to earth. The spheres were retuned; the singing began. And Monteverdi’s music itself gradually started to become visible in movement.

The American choreographer Trisha Brown has something of a reputation for creating dance on rooftops, on the edge of Manhattan buildings – even up and down ladders. But with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, which arrives in London today after opening in Brussels at La Monnaie, Brown makes her debut as an opera director. Four years ago she created her first work to classical music: a 55-minute dance set to Bach’s Musical Offering was quickly followed by Twelve Tone Rose for Webern. For Orfeo, though, Brown has had to create an entirely new movement vocabulary, capable of reinforcing the emotional power of music without interfering with the performers’ ability to sing.

The English baritone Simon Keenlyside, cast in the title role, found himself being drawn into workshops, classes and rehearsals over a period of eight months with ten dancers from Brown’s company. “And they know the entire piece inside out. All the words. I only wish they did more of the dancing themselves. But Trisha has deferred so much to the singers. She is so considerate – and so extraordinarily inventive.”

Francesco Gonzaga, at the court of Mantua, had commissioned Monteverdi to write L’Orfeo as entertainment for the carnival season of 1607. In an archetypical moment of deus ex machina flamboyance, the opera customarily ends with the heavens opening and the apotheosis of Orfeo in the company of Apollo, Eurydice and other heavenly bodies. But at the very first performance things were darker. Monteverdi’s libretto clung closer to the original myth and had Orfeo torn to pieces by the Bacchantes. I shan’t tell you how, but Brown cunningly enjoys the best – and the worst – of both worlds.

“Behind every move we make”, says Keenlyside, “there’s a lifetime of experience. Brown is a real master. I find myself reflecting, discussing things that I couldn’t even begin to address with most directors or musicians. I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed the whole process so much before.”

This is also Keenlyside’s first Monteverdi opera. “It’s like chamber music: that’s what I love about it. You have to pace yourself and listen to yourself as you would in a recital. There are times when you’re totally naked, as it were, singing to the accompaniment of a single lute.” René Jacobs is the master of music, and the players and singers of his Concerto Vocale and Collegium Vocale must be every bit as formidable as colleagues as Brown’s dance company. “Well, yes. They know you’re not one of them, and they’re absolutely OK about it. As long as you can produce something that’s truly interesting. Jacobs is one of the few remaining old-fashioned specialists. We’re all spread so thinly these days. Only when you work with someone of his calibre do you realise what you’ve been missing.”

Keenlyside is never happier than when talking about someone other than himself. In fact, these are just about the only conditions in which this elusive baritone will agree to be interviewed at all. Ask him about his own career – which has spanned Count Almaviva, Pelléas, Figaro, Guglielmo, Papageno, Yeletsky, in Geneva, San Francisco, Sydney, Berlin, Paris, New York, Covent Garden, to say nothing of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf – and he will reply, “Oh, we can do that in five minutes. I really never expected to be singing in any of those places. I just love singing. That’s all there is to it. But I don’t want it to take over my life. If the balance gets wrong, there’s no point. Singing’s a reflection of life, that’s all.”

And life for Keenlyside is every bit as much about long silent walks in West Wales and travelling in India – in the drenching heart of the monsoon season if at all possible. “If there’s too much singing and not enough life, you simply run out of things to sing about.” In his current incarnation as Orfeo, that seems to be just about the remotest possibility of them all.

Heavenly airs in the pit of Hell

Rodney Milnes for The Times, 5th June 1998

http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/98/06/05/timartopr01001.html?1406259

The advance buzz on this widely spread co-production of Monteverdi’s opera centred on the British debut of the American choreographer Trisha Brown, but in the event another British debut made rather greater impact, that of René Jacobs and his Concerto Vocale. The playing was simply superb, with the instrumentalists distributed between a barely sunken pit at the centre and two groups in the wings on either side; the antiphonal and echo effects, so important in this piece, were magically achieved.

And the sheer variety of sound – less expert period players can sometimes produce an agreeable homogeneous mush – kept you on the edge of your seat. Every one of the 29 listed players seemed a virtuoso (Mara Galassi’s harp especially seductive) and the clarity, expressiveness and tonal beauty of the playing set, I think, new standards in this field.

If the ear was constantly ravished, the eye was only intermittently so. The opening image could scarcely have been more spectacular – a flying dancer striking Tiepolo poses against a gauzy, circular blue background (her fast somersaults, though, perhaps too redolent of the Big Top). The circle was a constant in Roland Aeschlimann’s abstract design, with two neatly managed eclipses, all set in a white box that was manipulated into black for Hades. There was a slightly clinical look to it all, as there was to Brown’s choreo-diction; her fellow-countrymen Mark Morris and Martha Clarke have both tackled the Orpheus legend to bolder theatrical effect. The overall impression was of nicely, if coolly, organised movement rather than the power of dance driving the action.

But you had to admire Brown’s tactful handling of Jacobs’s ensemble of singers, who came in all shapes and sizes and executed complex drill formations without missing a note. And she inspired a stunning performance from Simon Keenlyside, one of two singers sharing the title role between the four performances (he repeats it this evening). He has always been as good a mover as he is a singer, but on Wednesday looked as though he had been attending dance classes for months, executing daring leaps, lifts and falls without, again, missing a note.

As for the notes, Keenlyside has a Lieder singer’s spontaneity in response to words as well as a beefy operatic voice, here used sparingly; he poured out phrase after phrase of the utmost eloquence, his repeated “Rendetemi il mio ben” in the scene with Charon piercing to the very depths of the listener’s soul.

He was not alone in vocal accomplishment: Stephen Wallace’s slightly bossy countertenor Hope, Graciela Oddone’s properly communicative Messenger and Tomas Tomasson’s gravelly Pluto stood out from the supporting ensemble in a performance of great musical distinction.

Rupert Christiansen reviews L'Orfeo at the Barbican Theatre for The Telegraph, Saturday 6 June 1998

As close to the perfect dance opera as I have ever seen

The problem of incorporating dance into opera is one that no director or choreographer has ever managed to solve, but Trisha Brown's production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo comes as near as any I have witnessed.

A great creative and performing figure in the field of modern American dance, celebrated for her extraordinary musicality and visual taste, Brown is working on an opera for the first time, and the result is profoundly impressive.

Instead of banishing the singers to the pit or confining the ballet to specific interludes, Brown has taught the whole cast to move with and through the music, using steps and gestures as redolent of the oriental theatre as they are of the hieratic flourishes of the baroque.

Costumes are timeless, the action simplified: Brown is less interested in telling the story or suggesting personality than in conveying states of mind and emotion.

The emergent mood is both cool and intense. Roland Aeschlimann's abstract settings feature a few stunningly beautiful effects - the exquisite flying figure of La Musica in the Prologue, a golden Apollo pinioned to a wheel at the end - but this is not a production for those who like their Monteverdi gaudy and splendid. With a running length of nearly two hours and no interval, its focused austerity makes considerable demands of the audience's concentration.

Still, with such a clean and uncluttered stage picture, the music is allowed to communicate its full force, even though the Barbican Theatre's flat acoustic strips it of some of its charm and resonance.

A fine team of soloists is dominated by Simon Keenlyside's heroic rendering of the title role. He executes his stylised movements with grace and confidence and cuts a handsome figure. His lean, firm baritone is always expressive, attentive to the text and supremely musical in its phrasing.

However, some of the heavier passages, such as the dialogue with Charon in Act 3, taxed his stamina, and patches of scrunchy hoarseness crept into his voice during the last two acts. René Jacobs conducts his band, Concerto Vocale, with eloquence, and the Belgian choir Collegium Vocale Gent sing with buoyancy and precision.

The production rejects the usual triumphant ending, and finishes with Orpheus being torn to pieces by the Bacchantes. There is some scholarly justification for this, but it makes a sour, unsatisfactory climax to an evening otherwise radiant with high artistic seriousness.