Texte paru dans: / Appeared in: |
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Appréciation d'ensemble / Overall evaluation :
 ½ |
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Reviewer: Berta
Joncus John Eliot Gardiner’s Il ri torno d’Ulisse in patria is a career climax, and a defining production. In 8/21 2017, for the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth, Gardiner organised and toured a staged concert trilogy of Monteverdi operas: L’orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea. Gardiner had yet to record Il ri torno d’Ulisse; so engineers forged this single disc from his threenight run at Wroclaw’s concert hall.
In incandescent performances, the artists turn the opera’s challenges into strengths. Early librettos show that much of Monteverdi’s original score is lost; these holes Gardiner plugs with earlier Monteverdi choruses and dances, accompanied by a band twice the size of the 1639-40 original, to gorgeous effect. Faced with lots of recitative and practically no arias, singers and players abandon themselves to intense arioso, jazzy cross-rhythms between poetry and continuo, and take-no-prisoners dissonances.
Although the
acoustic of Wroclaw’s concert hall is world class, this is a live performance:
the broadness of comic delivery in particular makes for tough listening, and the
super percussive consonants sometimes disrupt lyri ism. Too bad this CD isn’t a
DVD.
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