Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Monteverdi: L'Orfeo

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Thinking of last Sunday's Shakespeare presentation, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1644), the founding father of opera as a genre, was a contemporary of the Bard, and his L'Orfeo (1607), the world's first true opera, dates from right around the same time period as King Lear. The two earlier works by Peri and Caccini dealing with the same tragic story about Orpheus and Euridice did not fully express the classical ideal of structural symmetry achieved in Monteverdi's composition.

The last time I presented L'Orfeo was on Sunday, September 10, 2000 when I aired the Nigel Rogers/Chiaroscuro recording in CD reissue through EMI/Reflexe of what was the latest thinking circa 1984 of how to properly interpret this masterpiece from the dawn of the baroque. Prior to that, back on Sunday, April 21, 1996 came the Concerto Vocale recording for Harmonia Mundi, directed by René Jacobs, a countertenor singer himself with expertise in baroque vocal style.

Now you get to audition a somewhat more recent and thoroughly historically-informed interpretation recorded in 2003. Emmanuelle Haim plays keyboard accompagnato and leads the Le Concert d'Astrée instrumentalists, Les Sacqueboutiers brass ensemble and the European Voices, Starring as Orfeo is English tenor Ian Bostridge, opposite soprano Patrizia Ciofi as his beloved Euridice. This L'Orfeo was released in 2004 on a pair of Virgin/Veritas compact discs.