Claudio Monteverdi, L'Orfeo:  Soloists of the Festival de Aix-en-Provence, soloists of the Académie européeen de musique, English Voices chorus, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Concerto Vocale orchestra, René Jacobs conductor, production from the Théâtre Royale de la Monnaie 1998, Aix-en-Provence, France.  15.7.2007 (MM)

The more famous contemporary choreographers arrive from time to time in the South of France to ply their craft.  Pina Bausch inaugurated the Stéphane Lissner regime at the Aix Festival ten years ago with an indifferent, ultimately boring Bluebeard's Castle, more recently Sasha Walz brought her splendid L'Orfeo to Montpellier, water tanks and all.  Some years back Trisha Brown's troop of dancers showed up in the Cour d'Honneur of the Avignon Festival, enervating a small audience that fled noisily when it had had its fill of stomping and running.

But not so this Trisha Brown Orfeo at the Aix Festival where the audience sat entranced for two hours of mushy Monteverdi.  Danced rather more effectively than sung, this performance was driven primarily by spectacular stagecraft, brilliant minimalism and the indefatigable genius of Monteverdi.  It is no surprise that there was a pleased audience as this Orfeo was hardly a new trick, having proved itself ten years ago at Bernard Foccroulle's Théatre Monnaie.

Swiss designer Toland Aeschlimann provided a huge white box to enclose the action.  The front wall,  then the back wall held the same huge open circle on which Trisha Brown's flying dancer, La Musica, became the dynamic suspended decorations of a Renaissance ceiling.  A sidewall moved forward revealing the third act blackness of Hell and its guard Caronte, its fatal movement heroically resisted by Trisha Brown's Orfeo.  Then Euridice was turned to stone, the enigmatic tragedy was achieved, and Hell receded.  Eventually the opposite side moved onstage motivating Orfeo's apotheosis by pushing his assent onto Aeschlimann's perfect, heavenly circle.  These bold scenographic statements matched Monteverdi's mythology perfectly.

Ed Lyon as Orfeo

Trisha Brown's nymphs and swains, uniformly clothed in movement friendly loose white pant suits, enlivened the pastoral first act while Orfeo, loosely suited in energetic yellow, expressed his happiness.  Monteverdi's Euridice appears only momentarily; here in an elaborate, abstracted short gown in saturated blue, her subsequent death recounted by an emerald green nymph, La Messagiera.  The infernal spirits wrapped in cowled black robes rolled on the floor making the river Styx come alive with these unhappy souls marooned in Hell.  These strong shapes and colors of Aeschlimann's minimalist costumes attained status as universal symbols of the Christian and pagan tensions that preoccupied the Renaissance man.

There was little distinction in the movements and dynamism of Trisha Brown's ten dancers, the eleven young chorus singers comprising English Voices, and the twelve young soloists of the Aix Festival's Académie européenne de musique.   Trisha Brown's dance language is urgent and minimal, as is Monteverdi's music.  Movements are simple elaborations of ordinary human motions that are quickly executed while moving in concert with other dancers in and out of larger graphic shapes. 

There were two professional singers in the cast, the Orfeo of Ed Lyon (appearing in three of the six performances) and the Musica/Messagiera/Speranza of Marie-Claude Chappuis.  Mr. Lyon's Orfeo was splendidly sung and choreographically superbly rendered, his lengthy monologues enacted in abrupt, abstracted physical actions, a strongly defined Monteverdian musical word often underscored with a single powerful body movement.  Marie-Claude Chappuis's performance was less effective.  Her La Musica was vocally insecure, the highly dramatic Messagiera speech was vocally and histrionically tepid, though her movements -- arms and hands choreographically placed in precise, unmoving attitudes that underscored the sense of a verse -- were convincing.

The exploits of the mythological Orfeo, and here his courage to confront hell itself, are nothing if not heroic.  Not less so are the vocal and histrionic exploits Monteverdi requires of his Orfeo.  Mr. Lyon is a light tenor voice, a slender young swain, who for all his artistry cannot physically be Orfeo.  Ms. Chappuis is an accomplished, young early-music singer who possesses neither the adequate vocal size nor the physical presence or charisma to fill an opera theater.  The same may be said with some few exceptions of the young singers of the Académie européenne de musique.

Yet this was Ms. Brown's evening of highly theatrical movement in Mr. Aeschlimann's brilliant setting, an artistic accomplishment of considerable stature.  Even the inherent difficulty of the piece, the seemingly extraneous apotheosis of the fifth act, was overcome, the physicality of the scenography and choreography making a dramatic crescendo into the final, devil-teased tableau.  This was the evening's miracle.

René Jacobs and his Concerto Vocale were the willing musical collaborators providing a smooth accompaniment for movement rather more apparently than providing the specific sounds Monteverdi envisioned to amplify the words of Alessandro Striggio's libretto.  Though certainly there were some very fine moments, among them the harp accompaniment to Orfeo's plea to Caronte.  The twenty-eight players of Concerto Vocale were buried in the orchestra pit depriving the audience of seeing and even really hearing these exotic instruments.  M. Jacobs offered some acoustical and visual play, placing the sackbuts on the side of the stage for the orchestral prelude, and strings in the rear of the auditorium for the instrumental interjections during Orfeo's plea, through these few brief tricks seemed extraneous to the production conception.

For the past ten years the Aix Festival has been somewhat an artistic desert.  This evening did offer finally the Aix audience a production worthy of its attention.

Michael Milenski

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