During the new production of Monteverdi “Rolfeo” It premieres at the Santa Fe Opera on July 29, and it might seem a little strange.
Of course, we see a familiar sight at the podium of the usual Orfeo, in this case tenor Rolando Villazon, and conductor Harry Bicket. If a production by Yuval Sharon, one of today’s most creative opera directors, provokes any thought, it is for nothing.
No, it may be the sound coming out of the orchestra pit that surprises people the most. This is not Monteverdi like we heard. There are no harpsichords, sackbuts, theorbos, cornets, or period instruments. Rather, it will be Monteverdi, re-orchestrated and brought into the present by Nico Muhly.
“This is music that I have always loved, and I love Monteverdi,” said Muhly. Muhley has opera credits such as “Marnie” and “Two Boys”. For him, he “seemed like a really easy ‘yes'” to accept the Santa Fe assignment.
Santa Fe’s work, entitled “Orfeo,” is not intended to be a major revivalist blow to the period instrument movement, which has claimed it for decades. After all, Bicket was the musical director of English his concerts, was once a pioneer of the movement, and is still one of its prominent groups. And Muhly was offered the job not only because his love for the likes of Byrd and Tallis is professed, but is evident in much of his own music.
But Santa Fe’s “Orfeo” speaks to an artistic opportunity that is beginning to open up as the first generation of early instrument pioneers leave the scene, the early music movement faces an uncertain future, and all old debates about how works should be performed begin to seem obsolete.
Anyway, if you do “Orfeo” like this, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner and Jordi Saval Not possible in Santa Fe. The company has a resident orchestra that uses modern instruments, and even if it could bring the old instruments into the desert in the summer, “Given the size of the building, we’d probably need five theorbos, three harps, and all those harpsichords. That’s just not realistic for an open-air theater,” said Bickett.
The typical repertoire company is also unable to stage the works that have come to be heard. This is not only shameful, but harmful to our common understanding of opera itself.
Sharon said of Orfeo, “It’s not proper to call it the first opera, because I know it’s not the first.” “Opera wasn’t a genre at the time it was produced. But in many ways, I think it makes perfect sense to call it the first opera, because it set the standard for what we wanted in an opera.”
The orchestration, therefore, aims to make the work more practically performable in ordinary homes outside of Santa Fe, Muhry explained. “I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said. “It’s just that it’s not so unruly.”
composer for a long time I was interested in re-orchestrating “Orfeo” for modern ears. In dealing with the myth of Orpheus, this work is basically an opera about the power of music.
The play, with a libretto by Alessandro Strriggio, premiered in 1607. However, according to musicologist Nigel Fortune, the work was largely forgotten after Monteverdi’s death in 1643. until late 19th century. Then Vincent Dindy, Carl Orff, Ottorino Respighi, Bruno Maderna Everyone tried re-arranging. For his musical Maggio in Florence in 1984, Luciano Berio convened a quintet of young composers (among them Beti Olivero and Luca Francesconi) to rewrite “Orfeo”, also using electronic tape and rock his band. By then, however, the period instrument revolution was in full swing. When Paul Hindemith published his academic paper, “Trying to reproduce the premiere” In Vienna in 1954, Harnoncourt and other members of the recently formed Concentus Musicus Wien performed in an ensemble.
For Bicket, none of these or any other versions seemed appropriate for use in Santa Fe. Some included cuts, others used too much of my time. But with Santa Fe’s annual premiere tradition, the new work seemed an ideal opportunity to ask “what can young contemporary composers say about this music in this century,” he explained.
And Muhly is a fan of “Orfeo”. “There are a lot of insidious moments. What you get in terms of plot, what you get in terms of emotional content, it literally comes from small little harmonious movements, like weird apartments,” he said. “There’s also very traditional word painting. When you go up to heaven, he raises the scales. It’s a great mix of tricks and something very overt and theatrical.”
One of the reasons so many composers felt they could try orchestrating or adapting “Orfeo” was that Monteverdi left them with the opportunity. The sheet music published in the early 17th century omits important details, especially in the basso continuo, which dominates most of the work, so that even the most conscientious and scholarly performer of “Orfeo” must choose how to play it.
“There was no international music scene, so it was all a sketch,” said Bickett. “The composer didn’t have to put any information into the score, other than vocal lines and basslines and a few harmonies here and there, because at that time there was an understanding and a style that was part of being a musician.”
“When we do this with our players in an English concert, we read notes, but we are really reading rhetoric, and the heart of it is finding rhetorical gestures,” added Bickett.
Many of the conductors who performed or recorded “Orfeo” chose to create their own versions. Muhly pointed out that listening to some of the historically informed recordings of the work, one can hear much more pronounced differences than, for example, contemporary recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies, sometimes even in basic matters like prosody.
Therefore, there is no true “Orfeo”, where everyone is loyal and inspires creativity. For Sharon, the production of this work easily falls within his interests in how past operas can be recreated today. That impulse, beyond his acclaimed work at the Los Angeles company Detroit Opera and the Industry, led him to perform parts of The Twilight of the Gods as a drive-thru and reverse four acts of La Bohème.
Sharon said of Monteverdi, “We’re all guessing what it would have been like to play the piece.” “We have to interpret it. I think.”
Still, Mr. Muhry wanted some ground rules, and Mr. Bickett set them. “We agreed that it would be Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo,'” said Mr. Bicket, on the condition that the vocals and bassline remain unchanged from the original source. Biquet wrote up the vocal score, filling in the harmonies that Monteverdi omitted and noting where the chords could be restated or changed in other ways.
But otherwise, Muhly had to translate the material into his own compositional language, which he found in dialogue with early music and even early instruments. Among his published scores are “Bersuse and the Seven Variations” For Solo Teorbo.
“I think it’s because the music of the past is heavily reflected in my own original music,” he says, adding, “I approached this with a certain irreverent respect.”
That’s not to say the process was easy. In some ways it was easier than writing another opera on his own, Muhry said, but in other ways it was harder, requiring innovation and postponement at the same time. He arranged the basso continuo part primarily for small ensembles of alto flute, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, and harp, voicing the bass in much higher and lower octaves than tradition suggests. More thorny issues included mirroring the way Monteverdi scaled and expanded the orchestration, making the underworld distinct but not “cartoon-like evil”.
But what Muley counters and admits to be “a bit rigid” is the recognition that “a new or new interpretation of something somehow obscures or contradicts an earlier interpretation.” His version of “Orfeo” is not intended to replace earlier versions, much less to make the early material redundant. Far from it.
“Do you know what’s great, literally what’s great?” said Ms. Muhry. “If someone sees this and thinks, ‘Wow, I’m totally fascinated by this piece,’ and goes back and gets an old recording, in that sense, it’s a gateway drug. Similarly, if someone hears it and thinks, ‘I hated that so much, I want to hear the original again,’ and then goes back to the original again, that’s good too.” I think that’s fine. “
In the view of Muhly and his collaborators, more Monteverdi is better.
“It’s not really about me. It’s about you having a great night at the theater,” Muhry said. “We want to spice up the drama with music, and that’s how it should always be.”
