セラーからのコメント :
Monteverdi: L'Orfeo / Gardiner, Rolfe-Johnson, Baird
Release Date: 10/25/1987
Label: Archiv Produktion (Dg) Catalog #: 419 250 Spars Code: DDD
Composer: Claudio Monteverdi
Performer: Lynne Dawson, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Anne Sofie von Otter, John Tomlinson, ...
Conductor: John Eliot Gardiner
Orchestra/Ensemble: English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir, His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts
Number of Discs: 2
Recorded in: Stereo
Length: 1 Hours 46 Mins.
EAN: 0028941925022
Works on This Recording
1. L'Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi
Performer: Lynne Dawson (Soprano), Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Tenor), Anne Sofie von Otter (Mezzo Soprano),
John Tomlinson (Bass), Nancy Argenta (Soprano), Mary Nichols (Soprano),
Diana Montague (Soprano), Willard White (Bass), Mark Tucker (Tenor),
Nigel Robson (Tenor), Simon Birchall (Bass), Michael Chance (Countertenor),
Howard Milner (Tenor), Nicholas Robertson (Tenor), Julianne Baird (Soprano)
Conductor: John Eliot Gardiner
Orchestra/Ensemble: English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir, His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts
Period: Baroque
Written: 1607; Mantua, Italy
Date of Recording: 12/1985
Venue: EMI Abbey Road Studios, London
Length: 105 Minutes 43 Secs.
Language: Italian
Notes and Editorial Reviews
Claudio Monteverdi's 'L'Orfeo' is generally considered the first operatic masterpiece. Written in an attempt to emulate what was thought to be the performance style of the ancient Greeks, Monteverdi and his librettist created a nearly perfect union of drama, text and music that composers from Gluck to Wagner would, at various times, attempt to emulate and remake in their own image. The famous story is economically told, albeit with more principals than Gluck would employ for his famous reform opera over a century later. Unlike the later Italian works of the 17th century, 'L'Orfeo' was not a commercial enterprise and correspondingly used a much larger instrumental ensemble than would later be the norm, though there is nothing like a definitive orchestral score so each performer has extensive editorial choices to make in realizing the work for performance.
John Eliot Gardiner fields a full chamber orchestra and chorus in his edition. The cast is made up of many of the finest singers of the early 1980s, headed by Anthony Rolf Johnson as a particularly mellifluous Orfeo. John Tomlinson, later a famous Wotan, is heard here at the beginning of his career.
-----
This is an impressively musical Orfeo. With John Eliot
Gardiner in charge of such a strong cast of singers and
players, it could hardly have been otherwise. But it is also
a dramatically weak performance, and in Orfeo that is a
fatal flaw.
In the theatre, Orfeo is a gift for any director. It can be
played out—authentically, as it happens—as a courtly
entertainment, full of artifice and make-believe. It can
and perhaps should also be a deeply moving study in
human passion and will-power or the lack of it), a
tragedy notwithstanding the lieto fine. Some recorded
performances succeed in conveying exactly this
combination of ceremony and drama; most obviously,
the EMI collaboration between Nigel Rogers and Charles
Medlam results in a production that is stylish, intimate,
unified and highly charged. Played beside it, Gardiner's
reading frankly lacks direction and any sense of
conviction in its own character. The protagonists drift
through the story uncertain of their relationships with
one another; the orchestral interludes and sinfonias hang
in a dramatic void; the choruses, excellently sung by the
Monteverdi Choir, seem merely to have been spliced into
the tape.
Most enigmatic of all is Anthony Rolfe Johnson's acting of
the central role. Here is an Orfeo whose blood certainly boils, but
only very locally. When Hope abandons him in Act 3, all is despair;
but neither loss of Euridice—from life in Act 2 or from Hades in Act 4
—draws from him the sustained passion it so easily might have done.
Equally perplexing is his great address to Charon, the 'Possente
spirto' who bars his path to Euridice in the underworld. According to
Monteverdi's score, Orfeo fawns, pleads, and proudly proclaims
Euridice's virtues, and the fantastical interjections of the instruments
tell the same story as the extraordinarily ornamented vocal lines: this
is the music of a man possessed and deeply moved. Rolfe Johnson's
upper lip is stiff, his command of the embellishments totally assured,
but nevertheless it's a subdued, reflective performance, seemingly
addressed to an ill-defined space between Charon and Euridice. By
comparison Nigel Rogers (on EMI) makes this into Orfeo's great
declaration of strength in the wake of tragedy, the climax of the
opera from which he then proceeds to a second tragedy entirely of
his own making.
Nor is all well in Gardiner's reading at another turning-point in the
dramatic action, the arrival in Act 2 of the Messenger, who breaks the
news of Euridice's death. This is not an easy scene to handle: at first
the Messenger moans with anguish without telling its cause; the
shepherds seem to mark time by introducing her to us, remarking at
length on her state of mind. As a dramatic confrontation it works
only if paced properly. Harnoncourt's version on Teldec, with Cathy
Berberian as a deeply disturbed Messenger, is as good as one could
get. Gardiner's solution is quite different: his Messenger remains offstage
until the last possible moment, groaning to herself and afraid
to come forward, while the shepherds talk among themselves. With
more underscoring of the impending tragedy it might so easily have
worked; instead, the scene limps badly and feels awkward.
So many opportunities have been missed in this performance. Act 1
fails to take off at all; its latent flirtation and insinuations never really
surface. The scene between love-struck Proserpina and Pluto, one of
the few moments in the opera that borders on the tongue-in-cheek,
is played absolutely dead-pan. The finale is barely the romp it should
be. Throughout, the orchestral ritornellos serve no real function;
Medlam, by contrast, is surely right to turn them into masque-like
dances, dumb-shows, processions and curtain-falls, nicely detatched
from the main dramatic action. Many of the smaller roles in
Gardiner's team are taken by young singers whose strong voices
barely conceal an underlying sense of uneasiness; they sing well, but
they are no actors.
Had the Rogers/Medlam performance not been so very strong, the
weaknesses in Gardiner's new interpretation would perhaps have
been less apparent. As it is, they make the choice between these two
versions of Orfeo easy to make. In fact, while the EMI set remains in
the catalogue it's hard to imagine how it could be bettered. Intimate
in scale, authentically ceremonial rather than theatrical, immaculately
played, and with a fine cast spearheaded by the greatest performer of
monody since the seventeenth century, this is surely the recording
that Monteverdi himself would have recognized as his own work.'
Gramophone
-----
Rezensionen
E. Voss in FonoForum 11 / 87:"Gardiners Ensem- ble, ob Sänger, ob Instrumentalisten, erfüllt höchste Ansprüche. ..Es ist eine Lust, zuzu- hören. ..Eine Aufnahme, die Maßstäbe setzt."
-----
