Orfeo       Simon Keenlyside
Euridice/La Musica/Eco
            Juanita Lascarro
Messagiera  Graciela Oddone
Prosperina  Martine Dike
La Speranza Stephen Wallace
Plutone     Tomas Tomasson
Caronte     Paul Gerimon
Apollo      Mauro Utzeri

Anne Cambier, Yann Beuron, John Bowen, Rene Linnenbank

Concerto Vocale, Collegium Vocale, Trisha Brown Company

Conductor   Rene Jacobs
Director/Choreographer
            Trisha Brown

Wow. Monteverdi's Orfeo is usually pretty turgid in the theatre, though the
music is lovely. Trisha Brown's complete integration of music and movement
on a simple, timeless set gets rid of the spurious classicism and
translates the rhetoric of the narrative into visual symmetry and beauty.

The production begins with a stunning effect: the blue circle on the front
scrim becomes transparent and blue-white, and a swimmer appears in it as La
Musica sings of her powers. Except you realise that she's actually flying.
It's worth seeing for this alone, though I felt that bringing the flyer
back later without the scrim (so you could see the wires) was a bit of a
letdown.

The rest of the production was more austere, though there were some
breathtaking effects just from the movement of the dancers and singers. The
circle remained on the back curtain througout, with variations of light and
colour, ending up as the sun with Apollo mounted on it (like a bug, not a
horseman). The shepherds all wore white suits and black shirts, and moved
in fluid, curling rows, while the spirits wore crumpled grey stuff and
crawled around chaotically. There was a brief, gory eruption of fury-like
bacchantes at the very end.

The singers also used some small-scale hand gestures, to mixed effect.
(Nothing as expansive as what Sellars has his singers do.) The shepherds at
the beginning used them to overcode the words, perhaps to get as far away
as possible from rustic galumphings, but it looked fussy compared to their
more generous dance-like movements. The main characters, especially Orfeo,
used rather mannered mime-like gestures, and these often worked well.

In fact, Simon Keenlyside's Orfeo was an amazing, totally integrated
performance.  He's only registered with me before as nice voice on
recordings. Here he conveyed perfectly the poet's ecstasy in love, despair
in mourning and arrogance in invading the underworld, and mae it clear that
Orfeo is a poet, someone who translates every moment of experience into
art. His singing was sometimes uneven, but often very beautiful, and he
moved with incredible grace, reminding me (I'm not joking) of Jean-Louis
Barrault, though he also looks like Laurence Olivier. Maybe it's the
cheekbones.

The rest of the (generally young) singers were pretty good, though the
roles are too small to make an impact unless the director lets them, and
this was an ensemble production. Juanita Lascarro sounded exactly right as
Euridice and La Musica. (She was also a first-rate singing Fennimore in Der
Silbersee at the Proms two years ago.) Tomas Tomasson was suitably sinister
as Plutone.

The last time I heard Rene Jacobs conduct, someone made a bit of a dog's
breakfast of a Handel programme, also at the Proms. This time everything
was fine -- the orchestra played with grace and energy, again completely
integrated in the whole.

This production is in the Barbican theatre, as was the Glass/Wilson
Monsters of Grace. The technology is different, but in some ways the
overall effect is the same, image and music forming a totally engaging
whole. The substantive difference isn't so much that the traditional
theatrical technology works better (though it will be a long time before a
3D projection will be as moving as Brown's flying dancer) as that
Monteverdi works with the expressive power of the individual voice, set off
from collective experience by extremes of suffering.