Simon Keenlyside (Orfeo), Juanita Lascarro (Euridice, la Musica, Eco), Graciela Oddone (la Messaggiera), Martina Dike (Proserpina), Stephen Wallace (la Speranza, Pastore), Tomas Tòmasson (Plutone), Paul Gérimon, Caronte (Pastore), Mauro Utzeri (Apollo), Anne Cambier (Ninfa), Yann Beuron, John Bowen, René Linnenbank (Pastori, Spiriti) Trisha Brown Company
Concerto Vocale, Collegium Vocale Gent, René Jacobs First seen at La Monnaie in Brussels on 13 May 1998, this production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo seen
through the eyes of Trisha Brown and René Jacobs has become an operatic classic in a few short years.
This is doubtless because it offers a total symbiosis of music, text and movement – described by the
critic of the Daily Telegraph of London as being ‘as close to the perfect dance opera as I have ever seen’.
Or to quote Gilles Macassar in Télérama: ‘In the pit and onstage, the Brussels production has only one
watchword: mobility, nimbleness, dexterity. The singers run, fly, whirl like dancers defying gravity. From
the flies down to the footlights, the whole theatre is under a fantastic spell.’ For Christophe Vetter, on
ConcertoNet: ‘This Orfeo can be seen again and again with immense pleasure. . . . René Jacobs’s
conducting continues to arouse admiration for its precision, its stylistic rigour, its inexhaustible
inventiveness and its feeling for the contrasts so vital to this repertoire.’ "Monteverdi's Orfeo has many rivals and needs special reasons for us to see it again. One is the tremendous vocal cast - especially the lithe and mercurial Orfeo (Simon Keenlyside), the searingly affecting Messenger (Graciela Oddone) and sonorous Simon Gérmon as Caronte." BBC Music Magazine |
