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 off-stage 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.'