Myth-take

Luigi Rossi's L'Orfeo

by Lloyd Schwartz

"I haven't been so dazzled by costumes since I saw the Ice Capades when I was six," a friend remarked after Luigi Rossi's "tragicomedia" L'Orfeo, first produced in Paris in 1647, four decades after Monteverdi's landmark opera using the same mythological material, and the Main Event of this year's Boston Early Music Festival (the ninth). No question, Robin Linklater's lavish gilt-and-plumed headdresses, his glittering rhinestones, his rainbows of ribbons, satins, and brocades (for both men and women -- the men's dresses are just shorter), all made for (and rented from) Sweden's famed Drottningholm Court Theatre (which will first use them later this summer), are a major asset of this production.

The brilliant orchestra is another (despite the amplified lutes -- so much for authenticity), with superstar lutenist and Spanish-guitar virtuoso (and the festival's co-director) Paul O'Dette right in the thick of it. The players, at least, seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.

The opera itself is a more mixed bag. Over three and a half hours long, it seemed longer, though two and a half hours of music had been cut. Francesco Buti's libretto adds a rival to Orfeo for Euridice's love, one Aristeo, a son of Bacchus. Venus takes his side against Apollo's son (Orpheus), and before the evening is out most of the major gods and goddesses act out their arguments with each other. What keeps the opera moving -- or not moving -- are Rossi's streams of accompanied recitative, which (under the music direction of Peter Holman) felt directionless and rhythmically monotonous.

Rossi's music comes to life when he's writing for ensembles, especially a trio of sopranos who sing both the Graces (they warble a particularly heavenly lullaby for Euridice) and the Fates. He's evidently more excited about harmonies than about a simple vocal line. And by dances. Castanets and Baroque maracas lend some rhythmic oomph and some desperately needed rhythmic variety. Holman could have helped more here. There was little shaping of acts, scenes, or individual phrases, so except for those little bursts of change, the relentless sameness seemed interminable.

The original production was apparently a sensation, full of complex stage machinery and extravagant sets (and it lasted six hours!). Linklater's bland, economical box (a series of receding prosceniums and several changes of backdrop) didn't offer such distraction or anything to set off his costumes. Neither did L. Stacy Eddy's feeble lighting effects. Lucy Graham's choreography, though, especially a grotesque dance for red devils and a number in cute animal costumes (a frog with a moth stuck to its long tongue, a slitheringly expanding snail), were a welcome -- and literal -- change of pace.

Rossi fails the drama of the Orpheus myth by allowing its most tragic moment to take place off stage: Orpheus's breaking of Pluto's warning not to turn and look at his wife as he leads her out of the underworld. And stage director Jack Edwards blew the one climax this opera does have, the scene at the end of act two in which Euridice is bitten by a snake. Some explanation needs to be made that Aristeo, in his jealousy, is responsible. Instead, Edwards hid the action behind a crowd, from which Euridice emerged with a rubber snake attached to her toe. Nothing on stage ever suggested that Rossi might have wanted this opera to mean something.

Edwards, who staged BEMF's 1995 production of Purcell's "semi-opera" King Arthur, has still not discovered a way to make 20th-century singers comfortable with 17th-century theatrical gesturing. Dramatic truth is a matter not of style but of conviction. Only two of the singers used the gestures expressively, consistently, and "naturally": mezzo-soprano Jennifer Lane (Aristeo) and tenor William Hite, who played the amusing jester Momo (Momus, the god of bad-mouthing) and, in almost unrecognizable contrast (even vocally), the dignified Charon. Others were mostly sleepwalking. I don't mean that using old handbooks can't work, but the mechanics can't survive (and, through history, haven't survived) without feeling or real understanding.

Lane gave the strongest vocal performance, too. She has a big voice that she projects with force and point, though sometimes with questionable intonation. Ellen Hargis (Orfeo) has a more beautiful voice, but she kept running out of breath, and only rarely did she convey anything more than generic devotion or grief. Bass-baritone Jan Opalach (the High Priest and Pluto) was in velvety voice except for some forced low notes in the Underworld. The Scandinavian tenor Olof Lilja was appropriately dry-voiced as La Vecchia (Venus in disguise as an old crone), less appropriately so as Jealousy. Sweet-voiced Alan Bennett sang beautifully but made little distinction between Apollo and Jove. Mezzo Laura Pudwell was a coarse and lively Nurse and a startlingly raucous Bacchus. Few others approached their singing with anything more than wan and shrill "earlier-than-thou" chirping. And some were even worse. Maybe that's why, despite its many ravishments, Rossi's opera finally seemed so tiresome.