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McPherson Playhouse
March 15, 2014
For charm, beauty, dramatic vocal and ensemble brilliance I would be hard-pressed to find a single fault in the BEMF's performance of Charpentier's musical telling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice - save for one tiny cavil. For twenty minutes at least, waiting for the evening to start, we gazed at a flower strewn stage with a dead maiden holding an exquisitely uncomfortable pose, a suitable Louis XIV style stool, and 8 incongruously modern high back office chairs. Of course, once under the bottoms of the musicians, these no longer distracted, but as every other detail of costume, movement, gesture, instruments and the music itself so perfectly evoked the court of the Sun King himself, it seemed a pity that Victoria had not somehow been asked to produce the appropriate chairs. Barely worth mentioning, but as an antique store owner on Oak Bay avenue assured me the next day, this would have been the perfect city to help out with such a request.
Just one of the masterful strokes of direction was the decision to insert the tale of Orpheus as part of the courtly entertainment of competitive dancing and singing of verses to flatter the King, not least because it underlined the significant realities separating the life, love and death themes of the mythic hero, Orphée, from the much more superficial need to secure the favour of the Monarch as expressed in La Couronne de Fleurs.
The performance opened with the dead maiden, like a spring flower, emerging from her winter's death to welcome Louis back from his battlefields with the offer of a crown of flowers for the best praises. Pulling their themes from a hat provided the frame for the entertainment as well as the seguĂ© to the tale of Orphée. The choreography and movement integrated the songs and dance with a fluid, yet arrestingly graphic ease. What the BBC achieved with the 18th century world of English dance and manners in its Jane Austen films, the BEMF achieved here with the music, costumes (in a beautifully restrained palette of white, golds, coppery browns and greys) and gracefully stylized hand movements, to say nothing of the handsomely curvy calves of the men. The male trio in particular also immediately established themselves as consummate ensemble singers, and great characters.
Pulling the slip of paper with Orpheus' name on was greeted with the shock appropriate to finding something so out of character, and the mood began to change with the song of sorrow for the flowers losing their lives under the feet of the dancers, albeit in the preliminary rites for the marriage of Eurydice and Orpheus.
In choosing this most powerful of myths to present as an opera, Charpentier was not straying too far from the themes that would have been familiar territory in the sacred repertoire that he was, and still is, best known for. Namely the power of love to confront loss and the fear of life without love, and then dare the journey to death itself to reclaim that love. It is rare that one can experience something as if for the first time, and from a perspective not imagined before, even though that was traditionally imagined to be the very purpose of all ritual art - to move the audience from one emotional state to another. It happened here for me. First in the way the glorious tenor, Aaron Sheehan, so still, understated, yet powerfully felt, pleaded for the return of his dead love - the vitality and meaning in his voice separating him, like a shaft of light in the dark, from the shades he was encountering. But it really came home in the sense of loss and longing expressed by the dead for him as he was given permission to lead Eurydice out of the underworld- wonderfully sung by both male and female trios. In the Christian telling of this myth, Jesus spends three days in the underworld, but there is little or no elaboration of the meaning of the encounter. The insight expressed by Charpentier, and so beautifully realised by the singers, that the territory of the dead needs the living to pay attention to it was just dawning on me when there was a mighty and shocking interruption. Orpheus and his bride had just set out on their journey back to Life, and although I knew perfectly well that this was an unfinished work, I felt a keen disappointment that this monumental adventure was not to be played out.
Supposedly the god Pan called the timeout and summoned the players to carry on with the competition, but the staff-thumping character on the stage looked suspiciously like Lully - Charpentier's rival at Court who made sure that he never achieved the Royal appointment he longed for. This was another clever directorial move to add another dimension to the transition back to the Courtly song and dance. It could have felt like an anti-climax, but the sheer delight in the increasing improvisational intensity of the closing invocations, repeated over and over and made facing the audience, let us believe in that moment that we could all be masters of time, as the flowers always come back - and not just for the hundred years wished for Louis XIV.
My guest on this occasion, a young man from the naval base, was as ecstatic as the rest of the audience - he thanked me for opening his eyes and ears to "older music" - as he had never been a fan of opera. I really think much of the joy of Charpentier's opera lies in the fact that the smaller ensemble of harpsichord and baroque winds and strings never threatens to overwhelm the singers. In this case there was a warmth and vigour, a great liveliness and sometimes barely supressed joy from the instrumentalists which nevertheless left the singers free to express their deepest intentions without heroics, and the marriage of music and text was a very close and equal one. Stephen Stubbs, who co-directs the BEMF chamber ensembles, gave a masterclass in baroque performance to several local singers the preceding afternoon, and it was fascinating to see and hear with what a light touch he could lead them towards a deeper appreciation of the meaning in text and music, and the ways in which a pause here, a build there, could augment their effectiveness in releasing what was within them. Orphée in its entirety as a programme was deeply satisfying on many levels, and was a wonderful way for the EMSI to close its musical season. I am very happy to notice that Stephen Stubbs, now living in Seattle, will be back in November 2014 with Madrigals by Monteverdi. I will not want to miss it.
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