Only recently the first ever recording of Tomas Torrejon y Velasco’s opera La purpura de la rosa was produced by Andrew Lawrence-King’s Harp Consort for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi; now we are presented with another version, based on a production mounted in opera houses in Geneva and Madrid under the musical direction of Gabriel Garrido.
The opera was originally first performed in Lima, Peru, in 1701: a homage by the newly-appointed viceroy, the Count of Monclava, to King Philip V of Spain on his 18th birthday. The libretto, which retells the story of Venus and Adonis, was written by the great Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and had previously been set to music by the court composer Juan Hidalgo and performed in Madrid in 1660. Hidalgo’s opera has sadly been lost, and it is impossible to know how much Torrejon y Velasco’s setting owes to it, if anything. Bernardo Illari, the South American musicologist responsible for the realisation of the work as performed by Garrido, regards it as colonial music which, he adds in this politically correct age, ‘need not prevent us from enjoying it’. It is a great shame that Illari’s detailed essay on the decisions he had to take in the making of his edition of La purpura de la rosa are presented only in French and Spanish in the booklet: his summary is both frank and illuminating, so that the listener knows exactly which parts have been reconstructed (in effect, composed by Illari) and what has been the intention behind each decision.
The textual problems (in terms of both text and music) of the source result in some marked differences between this version and that by the Harp Consort, but this is not the place to explore these in any detail. The listener should be aware, however, that both versions have introduced additional items, and both show considerable ingenuity, based on years of experience in techniques of improvisation and early music performance, in the realisation of the musical score. My one quibble with the Garrido/Illari version is their determination to use a much broader palette of instrumental colour, to the extent of involving wind instruments such as oboes, shawms, recorders and dulcians in a quasi- obbligato manner at times: a lack of instrumental colour, Illari believes, would be contrary to the spirit of the work. There are times, however, when the instrumentation is very effective, as in the cave scene where Mars encounters the allegorical figures of Anger, Suspicion, Envy, Fear and, finally, Disillusion, in a confrontation with his own emotions: here organ continuo and low winds enhance the spookiness already inherent in the disembodied vocal writing for these initially mysterious characters. The Harp Consort, for all its richly sensual sound world, is less evocative here.
The great strength of the new recording by Garrido in terms of performance is the way in which it conveys the dramatic nature of the piece. No doubt the fact that it was performed on stage before being taken into the recording studio helped in this respect, but there is also a fundamental difference in approach: not only is Garrido’s dramatic pacing more revealing, but also his interpretation is far more text-based. And what a text! This is powerful, evocative writing, full of poetry, of striking imagery and universal resonances, of deep human emotions. Garrido’s singers, more operatically trained than most of those on the Harp Consort version, and much more at home with the language, use the music – for the most part in arioso style – to enhance the text, singing the dialogues and soliloquies with real meaning so that the tragic tale of Venus and her beautiful but doomed Adonis unfolds with great immediacy. If the Harp Consort’s roses – the symbol of Adonis’s blood and the flower into which he is finally transformed – are of red satin, sensual and enveloping, Garrido’s have the scent – and the thorns – of the real thing.
Given that the recordings are so different, textually and interpretatively, I can only recommend that you have both on your shelves. Torrejon y Velasco is not Monteverdi or Cavalli, not Lully or Purcell, but with this one work he shows himself to have been an instinctive opera composer writing in a highly distinctive idiom with its roots in a well-established Spanish tradition: a few more commissions from the viceroy and he could well have made his mark on operatic history.'