VANCOUVER — In the final days of July and the first week of August, Early Music Vancouver offers an annual festival, an intense series of concerts and special events. The most ambitious item this year is a new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which opened a two-performance run July 31 at the Chan Centre on the campus of the University of British Columbia. While this is a festival highlight, it’s only part of the Early Music Vancouver program.
Festivals of early music have long been an important feature of the Vancouver summer, but they have, quite naturally, morphed over the decades. In earlier years, there was an educational component featuring various short courses and master classes given by guests. More recently, a central focus fell on the music of Bach. This year, there is no such stricture but plenty to sample in a very full week of “early” music, including programs devoted to music of Schubert, Beethoven, and Dowland, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons featuring the Pacific Baroque Orchestra led by Rachel Podger, and a Bach-plus-dance event choreographed by Idan Cohen.
Orfeo, in 2000, was one of a string of large Baroque works Early Music Vancouver offered in the first years of the 21st century. It was followed by Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea in 2003 and a staged performance of Antonio Caldara’s oratorio The Conversion of Clovis in 2005 — a brave, much appreciated enterprise.
This summer’s Orfeo was billed as “fully staged.” Well, sort of. The main area of the Chan Centre is a handsome concert hall, not a theater. Obviously, in 1607, when Orfeo was premiered at the palace of the Duke of Mantua, the very notion of purpose-built venues for what we now call opera lay far in the future. This latest Orfeo offered a modicum of costumes, lighting and projections, acting, and movement, amounting to much of the totality of the opera experience but hardly analogous to a production in a true opera house.
Eschewing scenery and sets, the production used projections and a pair of small fixed platforms; several rows of seats were removed to create space for the orchestra in front of the raised concert platform. A central screen was added for the projections.
The performing complement was as small as could be: 11 singers with no chorus or extra dancers. The orchestra comprised 19 players led by festival co-director Alexander Weimann: strings, brass, keyboards, percussion, and — making for a particularly rich and complex sound — theorbo, authoritatively played by Lucas Harris, as well as Italian triple harp, played by Angélique Mauillon.
The cast formed various effective ensembles ranging in size from chorus to duets. Most roles were doubled or tripled throughout. Soprano Len Torrie, a former student of festival co-director Suzie LeBlanc (who cast herself in the minor role of Musica) sang Proserpina. Tyler Duncan had only rare solo moments but made the most of his depiction of Plutone. Bass William Kraushaar was especially effective as Caronte, the ferryman.
Orfeo pleads with the ferryman Caronte (bass William Kraushaar).
From a purely musical standpoint, the production was everything one could hope for. The small solo parts were well prepared, ensemble blend was excellent, and the orchestral playing exemplary. But the standout of the whole enterprise was the remarkable work of French baritone/tenor Marc Mauillon in the title role. He has a commanding stage presence, displaying a wide range of colors and complete familiarity with early Baroque-era vocal idioms. He owned the stage with lithe, telling movement and theatrical abilities second to none.
But apart from the excellence of the musical presentation, this production seemed alternately too ambitious and not ambitious enough. Projections by Camilla Tassi were well chosen but spilled inelegantly above and to the sides of the backdrop screen. For the pastoral opening scenes, conventional images from historical paintings were bright and apt; then, following the death of Euridice, the images degraded and darkened, a nice and considered effect. Scenes in the underworld were in moody black and white.
I suppose most opera fans are now only too familiar with the use, and sometimes abuse, of projections; given the logistics of the Chan concert hall, there were few other options. Ultimately, they worked, as did the costumes by Alaia Hamer. Costumes were essentially modern but with classical overtones, with the exception of the underworld scenes. If Caronte’s getup was effective, Hamer’s decision to dress Proserpina and Plutone in tacky finery and to make the men of Hades look like rejects from The Magic Flute jarred with the austere elegance on display elsewhere.
Movement was another modernism with a classic vibe. There was next to no dancing per se but a good amount of stylized action. Director Guillaume Bernardi, who teaches at Toronto’s York University, had a particular way of allowing the non-principals to freeze into vaguely classical poses; the counterpoint between action and repose was, like the projections, something that worked most of the time. The mise en scène proved simple, stripped down, stylized — whether by choice, or in response to the exigencies of the production budget and the limitations of the venue.
The pastoral opening had charm and coy vitality; the third scene with Orfeo’s showstopping “Possente spirto” — the first genuine solo showcase in opera — proved chilling and magnificent, but the faux-naive Hades scene and the concluding apotheosis were less successful. Not, perhaps, the director’s problem: In the modern world, the notion of deus ex machina is inevitably hard to make dramatically convincing.
As always, the festival offered a mixed cast of performers — some local, some from other regions of Canada — leavened by international stars. Given a strong and committed local audience for early music, events have often been quite focused, at times even esoteric. Festival 2026 has its adventurous moments, but in line with other major presenters in the region, nervous programmers have opted for several popular favorites specifically designed to bring in more general audiences.
There are two programs featuring the music of Schubert and Beethoven and showcasing Early Music Vancouver’s spiffy reproduction “Graf”-style fortepiano: piano trios with an ensemble featuring early-music veteran Jaap ter Linden and a performance of Die schöne Müllerin by baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer, both originally from British Columbia but now based in New York State.
The festival wraps up big with a concert anchored by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos with the house band, the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, led by another distinguished guest, Rachel Podger. There are programs of medieval songs and the music of John Dowland, with some contemporary repertoire, and a Bach-plus-dance event choreographed by Idan Cohen.
