Rinaldo Alessandrini, one of the most eminent baroque and pre-baroque music specialist, conducts Monteverdi's Orfeo, performed by singers who have been working with the Maestro for many years, and who now play in the middle of Robert Wilson's fairy sets...
Taped live in Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu on January 31, 2002, this L'Orfeo is both a visual delight and a musically satisfying representation of Monteverdi's opera
First seen at La Monnaie in Brussels on 13 May 1998, this production of Monteverdi’s L’ORFEO seen through the eyes of Trisha Brown and René Jacobs has become an operatic classic in a few short years. This is doubtless because it offers a total symbiosis of music, text and movement – described by the critic of the Daily Telegraph of London as being ‘as close to the perfect dance opera as I have ever seen’. Or to quote Gilles Macassar in Télérama: ‘In the pit and onstage, the Brussels production has only one watchword: mobility, nimbleness, dexterity. The singers run, fly, whirl like dancers defying gravity. From the flies down to the footlights, the whole theatre is under a fantastic spell.’ For Christophe Vetter, on ConcertoNet: ‘This Orfeo can be seen again and again with immense pleasure. . . . René Jacobs’s conducting continues to arouse admiration for its precision, its stylistic rigour, its inexhaustible inventiveness and its feeling for the contrasts so vital to this repertoire.’
Este filme não mais é do que uma interpretação, gravada, da famosa ópera "Orfeu", de Cláudio Monteverdi. Considerada por muitos como a primeira ópera criada na história da música, foi aqui levada à cena em 1977, pelo Ensemble Monteverdi da Ópera de Zurique, dirigido por Nikolaus Harnoncourt. A ópera conta o mito de Orfeu, um semi-deus grego com um talento especial para a música. Quando a sua noiva, a ninfa Eurídice, morre, ele decide viajar até ao Tártaro, o mundo dos mortos, para trazer a sua alma e ressuscitar a sua amada. Mas há muitos obstáculos, e as coisas não vão ser fáceis.
