It’s an evening of pity. That’s what the story of the ancient bard Orfeo tells, as set to music by Claudio Monteverdi as a grand opera. Orfeo’s young wife Euridice dies of a snake bite, her husband is inconsolable and wants to bring her back from the dead. He succeeds only briefly, the musical lamentation is long, Monteverdi pulls out all the musical stops. Director Tom Morris has something else in mind for the new production at the Vienna State Opera. At Orfeo’s wedding he offers party fun, has elaborately costumed party beasts marching on and announcers spread a good mood.
That’s embarrassing enough to duck away, and also a bit painful when hooting wedding guests jump in and acoustically demolish Monteverdi’s music, but it soon passes. Instead, the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsay appears and enchants in the role of “music” with her sad story. A nice directing idea: She sings in German and English before the shepherd continues in the original Italian. Her exclamation “that’s how I play with you”, cheekily thrown out as “music”, which calls for the self-reflective irony typical of baroque theater, is already redeemed.
Others remain unfulfilled. Above all, the ingenious music of Monteverdi, his genius for composing a lament in such a way that one is torn between astonishment, admiration, shock, joy and tears. The Concentus Musicus Wien, technically perfect, under the direction of Pablo Heras-Casado remains creatively below its potential. The conductor loves the broad stream of sound, that which flows calmly along, less the contoured edge or the sound speech profiled in the word, as baroque music absolutely demands. Georg Nigl, an experienced singer and lively actor, who was entrusted with the title role, which seemed to get out of hand, seemed a bit clumsy and comfortable on this evening.
One can well imagine Orfeo in a Viennese pub
Perhaps one can imagine Orfeo as a Viennese Beisl visitor who, after a few pages, sings to himself about the missing wife and moves his Haberer to tears. Nigl’s voice fits in with this, sometimes a little too loud, blatantly, sometimes pressed, the fluttering, slipped intonation. Likewise his muddled, panting variation on the baroque technique of melodic iteration, stepping on the spot. How effortlessly he meets his Euridice, the soprano Slávka Zámečníková, who conjures up Monteverdi’s melodies in the room, initially with a lot of volume, then again almost completely without vibrato and with a slender tone.
You have to find a melodic narrative tone in these seemingly endless recitatives that doesn’t sound overly sentimental, but also doesn’t sound too expressionistically barked out. Nigl resorts to this common trick more often: with exaggerated acting-vocal expression, give the impression that the composition has to be helped theatrically on the leaps. Most of the time, however, the impression of concealed defects remains.
The stage now rises with a creaking sound, you see a forest of roots floating towards the sky and find yourself in a romantic landscape of hell. Bluish wafts of fog on the horizon. Orfeo sneaking around silently. Wonderful. Other heroes rule here. The powerful-voiced Plutone of Andrea Masroni, Wolfgang Prankl as the menacing Caronte, the mezzo-soprano Christina Bock as the messenger and Prosperina. She masters something that many singers unfortunately cannot do: anticipate harmony. To anticipate the change in harmony in such a way that the sustained tone in the new tonal environment does not suddenly sound wrong and the frightened singer has to audibly correct it. In the end everything will be fine. Orfeo does not go back to hell, but to the sun in a golden basketwork. Or to the moon.
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