Orfeo

2026 Adelaide Festival

Orfeo

Ensemble Pygmalion

Adelaide Town Hall

March 6

When I first saw Orfeo in the Festival program, my immediate thought was Monteverdi. But instead of the maestro of Mantua, whose Orfeo is one of the most important works in the history of opera, the composer was the little-known Luigi Rossi. Monteverdi was a musical revolutionary, scathingly attacked by some critics in his lifetime, which is the fate of most musical revolutionaries. (One must question the musical judgment and intelligence of critics.)

Rossi was not a revolutionary, but he was unwittingly responsible for causing a revolution, just not a musical one. The immense cost of producing Orfeo, which at its premiere lasted six hours and employed two hundred people on the scenery alone, was practically the last straw for the people of France, who were already fed up with the wanton expenditure of the French court and the putative power behind the throne, Cardinal Mazarin, who had commissioned Rossi. Shortly after the premiere the insurrection known as the Fronde broke out. It wouldn’t be fair to blame Rossi for this, but his dream of writing more extravagant operas for the French court was dashed, and he never wrote another one. Is this a lesson for governments who spend too much money on opera productions?

Orfeo was cut down to just under three hours, omitting the politically motivated Prologue and Epilogue. It was a concert staging, leaving the audience to imagine what the hugely expensive premiere must have been like. Instead of being overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle of a lavish production, we were able to focus on the music.

Under the direction of the immensely talented Raphaël Pichon, Orfeo was completely absorbing from beginning to end. If you attended one of Ensemble Pygmalion’s earlier concerts in the Festival you expected something special. This performance exceeded all expectations. Pichon maintained a level of intensity and momentum that must have been exhausting for the performers, but it wasn’t evident.

As Orpheus, Xenia Puskarz Thomas, taking the role sung at the premiere by castrato Atto Melani (who combined the careers of singer, diplomat and spy), captured the tragic innocence of the character, a dreamer who was too caught up in his own music to grasp the reality of the drama that was unfolding. As Eurydice, beautifully portrayed by Julie Roset, was dying she called repeatedly for him, but he was very slow to arrive; he was probably strumming on his lyre somewhere. The frustrated would-be lover of Eurydice, Aristaeus (also a castrato role), emerged in this telling of the myth as a central figure. His bitterness, tragic in its own way, elicited a performance of exceptional power from Blandine de Sansal, almost overshadowing the two principals.

There was no weak point in the casting: Alex Rosen as marvellously resonant Pluto, Camille Chopin as a cunning and manipulative Venus, Samual Boden as an hilarious Momo (like Shakespeare, Rossi and his librettist believed in comic relief even in the darkest tragedies) and all the rest of the cast, could not be faulted. Add to this the fine chorus and orchestra and you have a magnificent evening of music and drama. It was no doubt expensive to bring Ensemble Pygmalion to the Festival, but it was a good investment; it’s unlikely that a revolution will ensue.