Carolyn Watkinson

Claude Goretta brings to life the age-old tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in a fresh adaptation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Monteverdi’s fabled opera Orfeo was long described as the first opera to have been written. Although modern scholarship has proven this to be untrue, the work remains one of the pillars of western music history, a musical creation which laid the foundations for much of what was to come. As musicologist Jack Westrup explains, Orfeo marked a major milestone not because it broke new ground, but because imagination had taken precedence over theory. While Monteverdi may not have been a revolutionary, his music represents the culmination of centuries of musical evolution, and shows him as the clear master of both polyphony and monody.

In Handel's day this best-loved of all oratorios was performed by fewer than forty instrumentalists and a chorus, less than thirty strong, of boy trebles and men. That is the tradition to which Christopher Hogwood has returned in his performances with the Academy of Ancient Music. Members of the Academy all play instruments of the period or accurate modern copies. In this recording the choruses are sung by boy trebles and male altos, tenors and basses, members of the Choir of Westminster Abbey. The soloists improvise embellishments in the arias and, in certain cases, join in the singing of the choruses, just as they would have done 240 years ago. The recording takes full advantage not only of Westminster Abbey's fine acoustic qualities, but also of the incomparable architectural splendor of the surroundings.