Northampton—For decades, the cost of mounting an operatic production has kept it out of the reach of performers at the University of Massachusetts.
That long spell will be broken next month, when a collaborative production of Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘L’Orfeo’ is staged at Smith College. The project is led by director Drew Minter of Hatfield, an internationally known countertenor, director, and expert in the performance of Baroque music and theater.
Minter has shaped a new translation and moves some of the action of the classic opera, not just its venue, to Northampton.
‘L’Orfeo’ Is the story of the mythological musician Orfeo, who uses his talents to sway the forces of the underworld so his beloved Euricdice can return to him.
All of the action in Minter’s production that takes place above the ground will be set in and around present day Northampton. Scenes in the underworld are set in New York City. Pluto takes on the role of a pimp, Proserpina is a prostitute and Euridice descends to the underworld to learn the culture of the city streets.
The production, however, remains faithful to the story used by Monteverdi, written by librettist Alessandro Striggio.
The May 2nd performance is believed to be the first fully staged opera production with instrumental accompaniment presented by UMass in over 25 years.
“The students of the UMass Opera Workshop have been clamoring for a fully staged opera production for many years,” said Elizabeth Parker of Northampton, director of the Opera Workshop.
Limitations of budget, time and space make such endeavors almost impossible. Collaboration is the only answer, Parker said.
The production joins the UMass Opera Workshop and singers from other Five College institutions with instrumentalists from the Five College Early Music Program. The set, lighting and costumes are by the UMass Theater Department. Smith College is providing the concert hall.
Along with Minter and Parker, the production taps the talents of: Robert Eisenstein, director of the Five College Early Music Program, and Nona Monahin and Meg Pash, dancers and scholars from the Five College Early Music Program.
“We are working together so that ‘L’Orfeo’ will jump out at the audience in three vivid dimensions,” said Eisenstein.
While the music for the production remains as it was in 1607 when the opera was written, the opera will be sung in a new English version of the original Italian.
“Several concerns have been uppermost in my mind in creating this translation,” Minter said in a release. “First and foremost is the preservation of all of the original rhyme schemes.”
Minter said he planned to continue to develop the production, during rehearsals, with help performers. It is important to be able to work with the singers, to change the text to fit the singers and their motivation at the moment,” he said.
Rare
Countertenor counts luck as his greatest asset
By Betty Webb
Living the High Life; Sunday Arts; Arts & Entertainment for the East Valley; March 11,
2001
Once upon a time in the bad old days, hundreds-perhaps thousands-of young boys were castrated so they would sound like girls when they sang in the church choir.
You see, it was considered sinful for real girls (or women) to sing in church.
“Greed, not religion, sometimes seemed to be the motivating factor for the popularity of the castrati back then,” says Drew Minter, an early music expert who will sing with My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort, an acclaimed early music group. “Poor families could earn quite a bit of money if their sons became successful castrati. Unfortunately, castrating a young boy didn’t guarantee that his voice would be any good, so there were a lot of tragedies centered around the practice. Eventually it was discontinued, and none too soon, as far as I’m concerned.”
Because women were also not allowed to sing opera until fairly recently, many castrati also became opera singers, and composers such as Handel, Mozart, and Gluck used their girlish voices for female roles. The castrati movement continued for more than 400 years. The last known castrati (the only one recorded) was Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922), lead singer of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
The irony of all this is that Italian choir masters were attempting to mimic a sound already popular in France and England—the lyrical voice of the “countertenor” un uncastrated man with a high natural voice. Countertenors had been popular since the 13th century, and were especially prized for their contributions to not only church music, but the popular music of the day.
Minter is that rarity—a natural countertenor.
“I grew up singing in the Washington National Cathedral; and when my voice broke, I became a baritone, and sang as a baritone in several operas,” he explains. “But I was also a countertenor, and while I was getting my postgraduate degree in Vienna, I won prizes for it at the Bruges Early Music Competition.”
Minter’s big break came when he replaced another countertenor on the recording, “Arias for Senesino,” named after the music Handel wrote for his favorite castrato. His pure sound immediately gained him the attention of both critics and fans of the countertenor sound.
“I’m the first to admit that having that other countertenor back out of the recording was an amazing bit of luck for me,” Minter says.
Today considered one of the world’s foremost countertenors, Minter is featured on more than 40 different recordings of early music works, opera, oratorio, recital, and chamber music. He also appears in two films: Peter Seller’s “Giulio Cesare,” as Tolomeo, and “In the Symphony of the World,” a biography of the life of Hildegard von Bingen, as the devil. He also has directed more than 20 productions of opera and music theater.
But Minter’s concert here will be confined to Elizabethan love songs, for which he feels a special affinity. They were, after all, the original domain of the first countertenors.
“You really can’t overestimate the importance of luck in a career,” Minter says. “As my interest in the countertenor’s contribution to early music increased, the record industry started to record more and more of it. Come to think of it, I may owe my entire career to luck.”
Handel
oratorio gets bravura performance
By Keith Powers
Boston Herald, Monday, January 29, 2001
Problem: Get a large crowd to sit for four hours in body-destroying church pews.
Solution: Hire seven outstanding singers and a great baroque orchestra, give them one of Boston’s quiet superstars as a leader, and stage a Handel oratorio.
So it was Friday at Emmanuel Church, where Craig Smith led a starry cast in what might have been the first American performance of Handel’s mythic oratorio, “Admeto.”
The plot is dotted with mythological characters such as Ercole (Hercules), sung bravely by Mark McSweeney, otherworldly situations, and improbably heroics—all to tell the tale of King Admeto and his star-crossed love life.
The remarkable singers were cast in a sort of vocal gender game. First Admeto, sung by countertenor Jeffrey Gall. A second male treble is scored as well, the king’s brother, Trasimede, (Drew Minter). And the King’s man, Orindo, was beautifully rendered by mezzo Pamela Dellal.
Admeto’s love interests—his wife, Alceste (soprano Kendra Colton), and Antigona (soprano Lisa Saffer)—made the difference between a great cast and a remarkable one. Colton threw thunderbolts each act, most notably in “Faro cosi” in the first act, as she commits suicide, and later in “Gelosia speitata,” after Ercole has rescued her from Hades. Saffer has phenomenal power for such a small woman, and a stratospheric range. At one point everyone onstage is in love with her, and the way she sang, everyone in the audience was as well. Bass David Kravitz sang nobly as her consort, Meraspe.
Minter one the battle of the countertenors, with an easier tone and beautiful diction; Gall had the heavy lifting, but his voice got stronger as the night wore on.
Performances of Handel oratorios have an anachronistic quality. Four-hour works are unsuitable for modern listeners; its hard enough to find classical audiences for programs half that long. But for fans of great singing, and music charged with emotion and grand gesture, there’s nothing like it. After it was over, the audience stood and applauded, ant the players in turn applauded the audience. The true recipient of all this good feeling was George Frideric Handel.