Monteverdi L'Orfeo opera to a libretto by Alessandro Striggio. Directed 2021 by Pauline Bayle at the Opéra Comique in Paris. Stars Luciana Mancini (La Musica / Euridice), Marc Mauillon (Orfeo), Sara Mingardo (Messaggiera), Marianne Beate Kielland (Speranza / Proserpina), Furio Zanasi (Apollo), and Salvo Vitale (Caronte / Plutone). Jordi Savall conducts La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations. Set design by Emmanuel Clolus; costume design by Bernadette Villard; lighting design by Pacal Noël. Directed for TV by François Roussillon. Sung in Italian. Released 2022, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA
Alexandra Goghlan seems bored by this title in her review (December 2022 Gramophone, page 98). She complains that Marc Mauillon’s Orfeo seems more like the “boy next door than a mythic hero.” The other characters are more “abstract ideas than people” and the production “adds little.”
Well, Clive Paget, writing in the April 2023 Opera News (pages 52-53) is a bit more realistic about what to expect from this piece that’s about 416 years old. It’s not an action movie—it’s “part myth and part humanist treatise that needs room to breathe and benefits from sympathetic stylization.” Here less is more as it directs your focus “on the emotional and metaphysical issues at stake.” And François Roussillon does his part as videographer with his “scrupulous instinct for imagery and dramatic pacing.”
So if you are using Blu-ray titles as a survey course of history of opera, this L'Orfeo might be a good place to start.
Here’s a trailer from Naxos (that also might be called boring):
OR
