La Favola d'Orfeo New York's Ensemble for Early Music and Grand Bande City Hall Concert Hall February 4.
THE two-edged joy of Monteverdi's early stage pieces is that they can be performed in the widest latitude of styles, and they are astonishingly modern.
Monteverdi himself sanctioned the style changes. Rather than specifying any particular one of the 40 instrumentalists, Monteverdi usually specified a group (wind, string, chord-playing). And Orfeo, not being an actual opera (there were no theatres in Mantua) is basically a concert piece, so the singers must still be actors.
That power was felt to the fullest with Frederick Renz's. Renz is a noted scholar of 17th Century music, and his ensemble of singers and instrumentalists gave what seemed to be one of the authentic renderings and what certainly was a passionate reading.
The orchestra was a sensitive gathering of strings, old-style trombones (one of which unfortunately squawked through his solos), a double-harp and several lutes. The singers, most of them doubling their roles, enjoyed a variety of styles.
If one had to criticise anything here, it was this very diversity. No, we had no castrati gracing City Hall stage. But the ladies showed an innate understanding of Monteverdi lyricism.