Seeing ‘L’Orfeo’ in Santa Fe

It’s a change so small, you might not even notice it. But the posters and playbills around the campus of Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico have given Monteverdi a makeover: Gone is the article from “L’Orfeo,” which is being styled this summer as simply “Orfeo.”

Few are likely to, and shouldn’t be, bothered by a shift so innocuous. And you could say the same for how the work, premiered in 1607 and the oldest surviving opera still regularly performed, is being presented here: with a deferential new orchestration by Nico Muhly for modern instruments, and a myth-free yet no less magical staging by Yuval Sharon.

This “Orfeo,” which premiered on July 29, was the last of Santa Fe Opera’s five productions to open during its annual summer season. A newcomer, having never been staged there before, it is also the highlight of the company’s current offerings, which I saw over the past week.

I started with opening night of “Orfeo,” in which the baritone Luke Sutliff jumped in to perform the title role — heroic not just given the circumstances, but also because of his thoroughly assured interpretation and stage presence, and, most impressively, the ability on short notice to pull off the complicated movement of Sharon’s production. (The intended star, the tenor Rolando Villazón, had been injured during the final dress rehearsal but was back by the second show.)

Audience members got a taste of Monteverdi’s score before many of them had taken their seats; at different corners of the Crosby Theater campus, in the tree-dappled desert hills outside Santa Fe, small brass ensembles sounded the opening Toccata of the opera, in a touch from the playbook of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival in Germany.

But once the show began properly, Monteverdi’s music took shape anew in Muhly’s treatment. Not so noticeably, though; each performance of “L’Orfeo” involves choices about instrumentation and articulation, work that has long been the territory of historically informed performance specialists like John Eliot Gardiner. Here, though, Muhly has written an indisputably clear, easy-to-replicate version of the score for modern orchestras, with enough lushness to satisfy a large opera house in future productions.

Muhly’s version of the score is most remarkable for how unremarkable it seems on the surface. Often, it sounds like “L’Orfeo” as we know it — opera’s foundational tale, of Orpheus and Eurydice — with small adjustments like a string line moved to the winds and more deeply fleshed-out harmonies. Occasionally, though, Muhly adds a flourish and a touch of his own idiom: tremolos of shivering tension; glassy violins giving way to arpeggiated textures; dirgelike calls from low brasses; fluttering winds.

He creates, in the end, a personal love letter to Monteverdi that relishes not just a musical conversation, but the making of music itself, which is in the spirit of both the piece and Sharon’s production.

Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera and the founder of the enterprising company the Industry in Los Angeles, is the most imaginative opera director in the United States, one who works in a collaborative spirit, across disciplines, sometimes to build a world premiere from scratch. This “Orfeo,” though, joins his Bayreuth “Lohengrin” as one of his tamer productions; there’s no headline-making concept, like the four acts of “La Bohème” performed in reverse or “Götterdämmerung” reduced to a one-hour drive through a parking garage. But here, he achieves a complex, deceptive sleekness while teasing out a single, timeless idea from the tale.

His production takes place on an AstroTurf-covered dome, a small, artificial hill among the natural, immense ones seen through the open back of the stage. At the start, a white bed fit for a sanitarium sits on top, occupied by someone visibly sick and dressed in white; it’s La Musica (the pure-voiced soprano Lauren Snouffer), who, after picking up a lyre, is suddenly animated with the potential of music. The stage is then populated with a chorus of singers, who are dressed as if presenting a capsule collection in oranges and magentas in Carlos J. Soto’s characteristically stylish costumes.

Orfeo’s story unfolds as a celebration of music and its meaning, its uses in moments of happiness and sadness alike. After the protagonist’s journey to the Underworld — in Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson’s design, the dome opens to reveal a dark, misty grotto animated by light projections — and after Euridice dies a second, permanent death, her voice (the soprano Amber Norelai) is heard through a gramophone that Orfeo holds closely. Who among us hasn’t done something similar, listening to a song we know will amplify our pain?

There are comedic touches as well, and joyous appreciations of community and music in an Arcadian ur-society absent of ideology. During the second performance, on Wednesday, that spirit turned from exuberant to assertive as the theater’s surroundings rumbled with thunder, and as the sunset was obscured by brush-stroke streaks of rain in the distance.

That night, as Villazón belatedly stepped into the role, he did so with noticeably altered, muted blocking, and his voice was as uncooperative as it has been in recent years. He remains a charismatic presence — funny, touching, magnetic — but his tenor can shift suddenly from smooth, with a warm vibrato, to raw, with a hard edge that doesn’t befit a character whose musical beauty moves the gatekeepers of the Underworld.

The Santa Fe Opera Orchestra — a group in nimble, lively and consistently excellent form throughout the week — took up “Orfeo” with brisk, dancing energy under Harry Bicket’s baton, and, promisingly, settled more into the score during the Wednesday performance.

This season, Bicket is doing double duty, also leading Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” in an appropriately enigmatic yet frustratingly obtuse production by Netia Jones. Seen on Thursday, his conducting produced something like the opposite of “Orfeo”: an atmosphere that moved almost imperceptibly forward, with flashes of color and sensuality.

In that production, the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey sang Mélisande with a weighty lower range and a mixture of chilliness and seeping passion. Another commanding stage presence — whether here, or earlier this season as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera — she is emerging as a major artist of her generation.

There were other vocal standouts elsewhere throughout the week. That “Pelléas” also included a frighteningly resonant Zachary Nelson as Golaud; his fellow baritone Huw Montague Rendall as Pelléas, often warm and achingly tender, strained only at the top of his role’s range; and the great mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who had the opposite trouble, plush but diminished at the bottom.

Two singers in other productions were even more memorable: the bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee and the soprano Ailyn Pérez.

As the title character in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” Brownlee — often working against a clumsy staging by David Alden, but supported throughout by the energetic, detail-oriented baton of Thomas Guggeis — projected agony and careworn bitterness throughout the theater, even as he was made, strangely, to sing lying down or on his side. (That was among many baffling directorial choices, including a “Spinning Chorus,” performed by Minion look-alikes in Oompa-Loompa choreography.) Brownlee’s enunciation was clear, his voice booming and blending well with the soprano Elza van den Heever’s mighty and ardent Senta. You could sense a fruitful Wagnerian future unfolding before him.

And in “Rusalka,” Pérez has found in the title role a part that rewards the richness of her sound. David Pountney’s elegant production, which treated the “Little Mermaid”-like story as the metaphor it always has been, has her rarely leaving the stage, crossing paths with the likes of Raehann Bryce-Davis’s playfully vicious Jezibaba and Mary Elizabeth Williams’s ferociously alluring foreign princess. At times Pérez was athletic, singing the “Song to the Moon” while climbing suspended chairs as if they were a jungle gym, projecting her longing as she leaned back, holding onto the furniture by a single hand. Through it all, her phrasing remained shapely, controlled and actorly, erupting in agony or passion but just as quickly retreating to a quiet, floating soprano, while in the pit Lidiya Yankovskaya teased out the Romantic elements of Dvorak’s score.

Inevitably in a densely packed series of performances, not everything lands. Santa Fe’s “Tosca,” with de Chirico-inspired sets by Ashley Martin-Davis, propelled with inevitability under John Fiore in the pit. But onstage, the baritone Reginald Smith Jr.’s Scarpia was a villain deprived of nuance; and while there was promise in the tenor Joshua Guerrero’s passionately Italianate Cavaradossi and the soprano Leah Hawkins’s sumptuous Tosca, a bit of vocal unwieldiness betrayed works in progress.

Keith Warner’s production had a few novel touches — including a jump scare better seen live than described here — but is mostly a dressed-up version of the familiar tragedy. And he seemed aware of his lineage in the opera’s history as, in the final moments, Tosca shot herself while a doppelgänger, dressed in a costume redolent of Maria Callas’s famous red gown and tiara, walked slowly offstage.

It’s a confusing, if unnecessary punctuation that isn’t set up by the staging. But Warner’s heart is in the right place: It is possible to present opera with reverence and a bit of fresh style at the same time. For an example, you need only look to “Orfeo.”