Orphée: Two operas by Marc-Antoine Charpentier
When/where: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., McPherson Playhouse, pre-performance talk at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $85, seniors and students $65; Friday gala $125; student rush $15. Call 250-385-0222 or 250-386-6121, online at rmts.bc.ca, in person at the McPherson and Pacific Opera Victoria box offices
Details: earlymusicsocietyoftheislands.ca, pov.bc.ca, bemf.org.
French baroque music, despite its many and unique glories, took longer than most early music to attract modern performers and audiences, though it now seems to have assumed its rightful place in the repertoire.
In Victoria, its profile has risen conspicuously in recent years, thanks largely to the Early Music Society of the Islands and the Pacific Baroque Festival. We have now heard a good deal of solo, chamber, orchestral, vocal and choral music from 17th- and 18th-century France, though the most important genre of all — opera — has remained elusive.
This weekend, however, Victoria will finally get to see a fully staged French baroque opera. EMSI has teamed up with Pacific Opera Victoria for the first time to sponsor a touring production of two short chamber operas by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704), one of the most renowned, versatile and prolific French composers of his day.
Collectively titled Orphée, this double bill comes to us from the Boston Early Music Festival, an eminent, internationally celebrated organization founded in 1980 and particularly admired for its groundbreaking revivals of baroque operas. Orphée was mounted in Boston in 2011 and is now touring for the first time. The whole production is being imported — more than 30 instrumentalists, singers, dancers and crew members, along with costumes, wigs, and props. (Among the singers is a Victoria native, baritone Tyler Duncan, but that is purely coincidental.)
James Young, EMSI’s artistic director, had long dreamed of presenting a baroque opera when, three years ago, he saw the Boston Early Music Festival’s production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea in Vancouver. “I was completely blown away,” he said, and was determined to import the festival’s next touring show.
Doing so has not been cheap: Orphée is, by far, the biggest undertaking in EMSI’s 29-year history. Young said: “We’re spending as much in two nights as we normally do in an entire season.” (The recent dip of the Canadian dollar has not helped.) But, Young added, EMSI has been “saving up our money for a long time” for just such a project, and it is sharing the risk with POV, which has lately sought to broaden its range by collaborating with other organizations.
Orphée comprises two works from the mid-1680s: La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus’s Descent into the Underworld), a tragic opera based on a familiar Greek myth, and La Couronne de Fleurs (The Crown of Flowers), a short pastorale with a text by Molière. In both, sumptuous, sensuous music is fused with dance and theatre.
The two operas will not be performed in succession, however, but in an original conflation, with La Descente literally tucked into La Couronne. The result runs about two hours including the intermission, which falls between the two acts of the former.
La Couronne is a charming depiction of a musical contest. Shepherds and shepherdesses vie to see who can sing most eloquently in praise of the king, Louis XIV, the winner to receive a crown of flowers from the goddess Flore. In the Boston staging, Orphée’s tale — he enters the Underworld and uses his musical prowess to win back his beloved, Euridice — becomes one entry in the contest. The conflation makes dramatic sense, the more so as both operas celebrate, in different ways, the power of music.
(Incidentally, a CD of the Boston Early Music Festival’s Charpentier double bill, on the German label CPO, is being released this month to coincide with the tour.)
Young is already thinking ahead to other operas EMSI may present: Monteverdi, Handel, Haydn, perhaps a very early specimen of the Classical style (ca. 1720-60). Of course, much depends on how Orphée is received. “It’s a huge gamble,” Young said — but it shouldn’t be, really, not with all the early-music and opera fans here.
Consider this: The Orphée tour comprises precisely two cities, Victoria and New York. Other major cities wanted to import the production but balked at the expense. This speaks volumes about EMSI and POV, both of which have repeatedly demonstrated more ambition and adventurousness than we have a right to expect in a city this size.
Even in the biggest cities, French baroque opera remains a rare and exciting treat, so no one in our humble burg who loves either early music or opera should miss Orphée.