Monteverdi Orfeo

Semi-staged performance

Jonathan Miller's acclaimed production comes to the Three Choirs.

Based on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, who attempts to rescue his dead lover Eurydice from the underworld, Orfeo is one of the earliest works recognized as an ‘opera’, to text by Alessandro Striggio and written for the annual carnival in Mantua in 1607.

With this opera Monteverdi had created an entirely new style of music, the 'dramma per musica', literally ‘play written to be set to music’ taken from the notion that the Ancient Greeks had sung their plays. It is also an early example of a composer assigning specific instruments to parts in an unusually explicit way.

"Jonathan Miller breathed an extra dimension into the Orpheus-Eurydice myth which lifted Monteverdi's exquisite music on to an entrancing new plane. Tucker's impressive performance grew in stature as the piece progressed; Joanne Lunn, Julia Gooding and Michael George also distinguished themselves amid a cast with no weak links, fusing with Pickett's period players in Monteverdi as authentic as it gets. This packed, rapt house was privileged indeed."
The Observer