Monteverdi: LOrfeo – Sergio Vartolo

Four hundred years, and the shepherd still weeps convincingly.

That is the miracle of L’Orfeo. No recording quite explains it, though some come closer than others. This new version arrives in the wash of quatercentenary tributes that swept through 2007, and it reduces the instrumental forces to something like half of what the same maestro mustered a decade earlier for Naxos. Six string players now, where there were twenty. You feel the difference before you can articulate it: the sound is drier, quicker to speak, closer to what a Mantuan court audience might actually have heard crammed into a room built for cards and gossip, not grand opera.

Sylvia Pozzer sings both Musica and Euridice, a doubling that has become almost traditional. Pozzer’s voice has a silvery evenness that suits the prologue’s ceremonial address to the audience, though I found myself wanting more sensuous weight in Euridice’s few precious lines. She has little to sing and needs to make every syllable count; Monteverdi was a miser with his heroine’s music, almost cruel about it, and a singer has to work against that austerity rather than merely inhabit it.

William Matteuzzi is another matter. Tenors who take on Orfeo inherit a strange burden — the role was written for a specific low tenor voice, Francesco Rasi’s, and it sits in a register that modern singers often find either too high for comfort or too low for glamour. Matteuzzi threads it shrewdly. “Possente spirto,” where Orfeo pleads with Charon, is where every recorded Orfeo stands or falls, and here the divisions are not just decorative but argued: you hear a man reasoning his way past a boatman, not merely showing off a trill. Whether he touches the desolation Helmut Krebs found in that 1950s Wenzinger recording, cut with almost nothing but conviction and period harpsichord continuo — I’m honestly not sure. Different era, different notion of what grief in music sounds like.

Sara Mingardo, as Messaggera and then Proserpina, remains one of the great glories of this whole interpretation tradition. Her voice has that dark contralto burnish that makes the announcement of Euridice’s death, “In un fiorito prato,” genuinely stop the room. Few singers manage to make bad news sound so beautifully reluctant to be told.

Textually the release restores the ambiguity Monteverdi himself seems to have wrestled with. The 1607 libretto has Orfeo torn apart, in effect, by furious Bacchantes, though no music for that scene survives, only stage directions and shouted lines. By 1609, evidently unhappy with tragedy unresolved, Monteverdi wrote the ascension scene instead, Apollo descending to lift Orfeo bodily into the heavens, opera’s first deus ex machina played entirely straight. Whether that ending is dramatically satisfying is a four-hundred-year-old argument I won’t settle here. But hearing both endings placed side by side, the earlier scholarly reconstruction usually included on the conductor’s older set for comparison, spoken rather than sung, shouted almost, like a fragment of commedia dell’arte intruding on high myth, makes the case, better than any liner note could, for how uncertain even Monteverdi was about what kind of opera he had invented.

Because that is the deeper point. L’Orfeo is not merely early, it’s foundational, and it doesn’t yet know its own rules. Peri and Caccini had experimented before him, but it was Monteverdi who understood that recitative could carry the emotional freight of an entire scene, that a single line repeated with harmonic variation could function like an aria without yet being one. Every recording of this piece is really an argument about how far to trust that primitiveness, how much to smooth it into something recognizably operatic and how much to leave raw, ritualistic, almost medieval in its pacing.

This new, leaner reading trusts the rawness. Ensembles are lithe, ritornellos snap rather than glow, and the toccata that opens the whole enterprise, Monteverdi’s fanfare, essentially operatic overture number one, has real brass bite, trumpets slightly astringent in a way that would have pleased the Gonzaga court and unsettled a Romantic sensibility. Tempos don’t differ dramatically from the earlier disc, as far as I can tell. What differs is the weight underneath them: a chamber ensemble breathing together rather than a fuller Baroque orchestra carrying the momentum forward on sheer mass.

Owners of the earlier version needn’t feel they bought inferior goods. This is refinement, not correction. A second visit to the same material with fewer players and, I suspect, a decade’s worth of second thoughts about ornamentation and pacing. Both belong on the shelf, oddly, as a pair, not because either supersedes the other, but because together they show something true about L’Orfeo itself: that it survives radically different scales of realization and comes out persuasive each time.

Four centuries on, that shepherd’s grief still lands. Recommended, warmly, alongside its own leaner-fleshed sibling, and essential, still, for anyone tracing where opera actually began.