Monteverdi
's opera
Orfeo
of 1607 has been recorded many times, but the new ensemble
Les Épopées
has come up with a genuinely fresh reading. The group's name means "The Epics," referring to the improvisatory quality of traditional epic singing, and the ensemble and its director,
Stéphane Fuget
, strive to bring alive the emotional immediacy of the work, something that must have seemed almost unbelievably startling to its first hearers, raised on Renaissance polyphony.
Fuget
's continuo group is large but focused, with a quintet of chitarrones and guitars keeping the rhythm moving forward. The singers all apply a good deal of ornamentation, never self-indulgent but tied closely to the content of what is being sung. Yet none of this would matter if there weren't a strong Orfeo, a lead tenor, to power the whole thing, and
indisputably has one in
Christoph Prégardien
. Sample the sequences of his numbers in the last two acts, as he enters the underworld and loses his Euridice, and one will get the chill that great opera is supposed to give. The ancillary matters are all bonuses; the sound environment of the Salle des Croisades at Versailles Castle (which issued the album) should be a close stand-in for the castle in Mantua, where the work was first heard, and the luxurious booklet offers many evenings of new insights. A splendid release. ~ James Manheim