Peri: Euridice
Soloists
Ensemble Arpeggio
Roberto de Caro
This is where is all started. Euridice is the earliest serving opera. (Peri’s earlier opera Dafne has not survived). It is of course very different to any of the operas I have listened to so far in this project. It is largely made up of recitative with some madrigal-like passages for combined voices and a few purely instrument moments. To be honest I was expecting to be rather bored by in fact much of it was rather compelling. The vocal line is very flexible and there are some surprising harmonic twists and turns. The most obviously dramatic moment is the repeated interjections of the chorus after the news of the death of Euridice - this was genuinely moving.
Of course any performance of a piece like this has to be conjectural. We don’t really know how the music sounded originally, what instruments were used and how the text was articulated. But to me this performance did seem credible - it was quite stripped back and a long way removed from the sort of reconstructions that Raymond Leppard did 50 years ago when performing Monterverdi and Cavalli. Though who is to say that those composers might have loved the way he approached his realisations. There was only one moment where some additional recorded parts seem to come in from nowhere and twitter away for a a while before disappearing again.
This sort of opera is probably very difficult to bring off in the theatre but as a purely aural experience it was attractive and well worth hearing. It is a good start to the next part of this project.
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