L'orfeo - DVD
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This is the third L’Orfeo I’ve seen on DVD, and it’s a real success. In style it fits among the theatrical productions that use over 20 singers and over 20 players, even adding some supernumeraries to fill the stage. Yet as a performance it should stand comparison with the intimate versions that we have heard on CD recently, since Pier Luigi Pizzi, the stage director who also designed the sets and costumes, replicated the venue of the first production in the Mantua residence. This may suggest that adhering to the minimal personnel of the alternative interpretation (a dozen singers and a dozen players, more or less) is not really necessary, or simply that Pizzi imagines a pretty big palace. But he imagines well, for this is the best stage set, the best costumes, the best lighting, and the best camerawork of the three versions I’ve seen. It is simply the best theatrical production of an opera that I’ve ever seen on DVD (not that I’ve seen very many). All three were made in live performances (the Harnoncourt video of 1979 was pantomimed in a studio 10 months after the performance was recorded), but the audience manifests itself only twice at the ends of the two halves. Christie’s was a single performance of May 19, 2008, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, while Jean Claude Malgoire’s was made at Tourcoing in October 2004 (also for Dynamic) and Stephen Stubbs’s was made in Amsterdam in July 1997 for Opus Arte.
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- GenreMusicDescriptionThis is the third L’Orfeo I’ve seen on DVD, and it’s a real success. In style it fits among the theatrical productions that use over 20 singers and over 20 players, even adding some supernumeraries to fill the stage. Yet as a performance it should stand comparison with the intimate versions that we have heard on CD recently, since Pier Luigi Pizzi, the stage director who also designed the sets and costumes, replicated the venue of the first production in the Mantua residence. This may suggest that adhering to the minimal personnel of the alternative interpretation (a dozen singers and a dozen players, more or less) is not really necessary, or simply that Pizzi imagines a pretty big palace. But he imagines well, for this is the best stage set, the best costumes, the best lighting, and the best camerawork of the three versions I’ve seen. It is simply the best theatrical production of an opera that I’ve ever seen on DVD (not that I’ve seen very many). All three were made in live performances (the Harnoncourt video of 1979 was pantomimed in a studio 10 months after the performance was recorded), but the audience manifests itself only twice at the ends of the two halves. Christie’s was a single performance of May 19, 2008, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, while Jean Claude Malgoire’s was made at Tourcoing in October 2004 (also for Dynamic) and Stephen Stubbs’s was made in Amsterdam in July 1997 for Opus Arte.TitleL'orfeoFormatDVDMPAA RatingNRStudioDynamic Italy
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This is the third L’Orfeo I’ve seen on DVD, and it’s a real success. In style it fits among the theatrical productions that use over 20 singers and over 20 players, even adding some supernumeraries to fill the stage. Yet as a performance it should stand comparison with the intimate versions that we have heard on CD recently, since Pier Luigi Pizzi, the stage director who also designed the sets and costumes, replicated the venue of the first production in the Mantua residence. This may suggest that adhering to the minimal personnel of the alternative interpretation (a dozen singers and a dozen players, more or less) is not really necessary, or simply that Pizzi imagines a pretty big palace. But he imagines well, for this is the best stage set, the best costumes, the best lighting, and the best camerawork of the three versions I’ve seen. It is simply the best theatrical production of an opera that I’ve ever seen on DVD (not that I’ve seen very many). All three were made in live performances (the Harnoncourt video of 1979 was pantomimed in a studio 10 months after the performance was recorded), but the audience manifests itself only twice at the ends of the two halves. Christie’s was a single performance of May 19, 2008, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, while Jean Claude Malgoire’s was made at Tourcoing in October 2004 (also for Dynamic) and Stephen Stubbs’s was made in Amsterdam in July 1997 for Opus Arte.
C. Monteverdi - L'orfeo [DIGITAL VIDEO DISC] Released 2005 product/publication from Dynamic Italy
Stefano Landi was an influential early opera composer, and La morte d'Orfeo is regarded as a milestone in the development of the genre. The narrative starts where Monteverdi's L'Orfeo ends, taking us through the remaining adventures of Orpheus in the underworld. Beaten to death and torn apart by the fearsome maenads, Orpheus survives as a wandering soul and is finally reincarnated as a star in the sky. Landi succeeded in turning Greek tragedy into timeless music-drama, the starting point of all opera, and Seen and Heard International declared that it had 'never before encountered such technical perfection' in Pierre Audi's Amsterdam production.
Opera was in it's infancy when Monteverdi wrote L'Orfeo, only six years after the first example of a drama set wholly to music had been performed in Florence. He brought to the work a revolutionary synthesis of text, staging and musical architectural that virtually defined the future of opera. John Eliot Gardiner first conducted L'Orfeo at the Proms in London in 1967. For decades he has been at the forefront of Monteverdi performance and scholarship and in 2017, the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi's birth, and the 50th anniversary of his own first performance of the opera, he undertook the crowning achievement of his association with the composer, an odyssey to perform all three surviving full-length operas. This performance of L'Orfeo was given at the historic Teatro La Fenice in Venice - which has seen triumphant premieres of works by Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and many others - in a critically acclaimed semi-staged production.
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