New York Classical Review

Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo is sometimes called “the first opera.”  Scholars suggest other candidates for that title, but none dispute that Orfeo is the first work of genius in that storied genre. Composed in 1607, it is contemporary with Shakespeare’s four greatest tragedies, and shares with them exceptional poetry, psychological insight and dramatic impact. One sees the green shoots of modernity growing in all of them.

Tenet Vocal Artists, an ensemble known for presenting early music in concert, spread its wings last weekend with a fully-staged rendition of Orfeo at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Christian Church. Saturday’s performance not only proved deeply affecting in its own right, but vividly demonstrated how Monteverdi used all the musical and theatrical resources of his time to establish a powerful new art form.

The court spectacles from which Orfeo was derived often began with an allegorical figure singing the praises of the noble host. In Monteverdi’s opera that figure was La Musica, and the praise was to the art of music itself, setting the stage for the entrance of Orpheus, mythology’s iconic musician.

Soprano Jolle Greenleaf did the honors on behalf of music with light, ingratiating tone and semi-stylized gestures appropriate to her antique role. Greenleaf is also the artistic director of Tenet, so this performance was effectively the boss giving her blessing to the entire production.

Jacob Perry’s entrance as Orfeo was a moment of cognitive dissonance, as the tenor’s husky build, graying beard and modest voice hardly matched traditional images of the divinely gifted stripling youth who could charm the birds out of the trees with his song. But Monteverdi’s music, the visually engrossing production and Perry’s utter commitment to the role quickly overcame such cavils, and the listener was right there with Orfeo through the joy of his marriage and the very modern-sounding stages of grief he experienced after the loss of Euridice.

In fact, when it came to emotional engagement, the entire production reflected the transitional nature of Orfeo by walking a line between the formalized expression of early court entertainments and the naturalistic acting one expects in opera today. The splendidly polyphonic choruses that closed each act represented the former, while Elisa Sutherland’s heart-wrenching turn as La Messaggiera (the Messenger), shattering the wedding revels with the news of Euridice’s death, then all but killing herself with guilt and shame, was pure verismo. (Happily, Sutherland was double-cast later as La Speranza [Hope], leading Orfeo on his quest to get Euridice back.)

Madeline Healey was appealingly ingenuous of voice and demeanor as Euridice, tearing no passion to tatters but touching in her distress as Orfeo’s mistake of looking back at her caused his wife to be borne back to the underworld.

An ensemble of 10 singers supplied all the other individual roles large and small, coalesced for dance numbers and choruses, and helped with stage effects such as Orfeo’s journey to the underworld. Individual vocal styles ranged all the way from forward-placed, slender straight tone to heady, tight vibrato and everything in between—a puzzle for historical purists, perhaps, but no hindrance to one’s involvement in the show.

Standout performances, in striking costumes by Ramona Ponce, included drainpipe basso Paul Max Tipton draped head to toe in black as the forbidding River Styx boatman Caronte, refusing Orfeo’s pleas to cross until lulled to sleep by the latter’s soft but highly ornate lullaby; Harrison Hintzsche and Paulina Francisco in dark finery as the royal couple of the underworld, Plutone and Proserpina, granting Orfeo’s plea to free Euridice; and a bright-voiced James Reese as the sun god Apollo, resplendent in gold robe and crown, rescuing Orfeo from his grief and sweeping him up to the heavens at the climax of Act V.

The modest-sized church was outfitted with a small stage and a back wall where Camila Tassi’s evocative projections set the scenes for the opera’s five acts, from the pastoral fields of Thrace to the dark underworld of King Plutone to the starry vault where Euridice eventually twinkled as a constellation.

Each of the church’s columns bore a video screen, so that the translated text was beamed to every section of the audience, making Alessandro Striggio’s poetic libretto easily accessible to all.

Artful lighting by Stacey Boggs aided the illusion of larger spaces and highlighted the chorus’s nimble dancing as shepherds or underworld spirits. No choreographer was listed in the program, so credit for the cast’s expressive movement onstage presumably goes to stage director Alyssa Weathersby, whose sure handling of this production was as great a factor in its success as the musical performance.

And that’s saying something, as music director Charles Weaver led an all-star band of 15 early music instrumentalists arrayed around the stage, pealing out the festive overture, setting the cast dancing to irresistible rhythms, supporting the singers in arias and recitatives, and weaving moods pastoral or sepulchral in ways any latter-day opera fan could understand.

And how, you might ask, did this frugal production manage Apollo’s deus ex machina turn without any machina?  Simple—Apollo made his entrance stage right Fanny Brice-style, concealed by a cutout sun disk and rays, before stepping forward to sing. And when the time came for him and Orfeo to rise up into the sky, the two singers simply stood where they were while the starry projection behind them went downward.

Tenet’s artistic director Greenleaf has expressed a wish to stage more operas with her ensemble in the future. If they all come together as superbly as this maiden effort did, that’s a wish we can all share.

Tenet Vocal Artists presents “Still Life with Dowland and Britten,” songs by those two composers performed by soprano Jolle Greenleaf, tenor Haitham Haidar, lutenist Charles Weaver and harpist Amanda Beranek, 6 p.m. October 15 at House of the Redeemer, Fabbri Mansion, Manhattan, and 6 p.m. October 16 at Church of the Ascension, Brooklyn. tenet.nyc