Adrian Noble's production of Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria was widely acclaimed when it first appeared at the Aix-en-Provence festival two years ago. It has just finished a run at the Opéra Comique in Paris, and is bound for New York; on the back of the French performances it came to the Barbican on Sunday, or at least the bare bones of it did.
Although this was announced in advance as a concert performance, presented by Les Arts Florissants under William Christie in the Barbican's Great Performers series, the singers, all in casual black, did their best to rekindle the spirit and the dramatic flavour of the original show. They moved purposefully around the forestage, making exits and entrances, weaving in and out of the orchestra. Props came and went. Ulysses had a staff to signal when he was in his disguise as a beggar, and Irus taunted him with real food in the second act. The great bow, however, was non-existent, and Ulysses had to string it in dumb play, before killing Penelope's suitors in a similarly stylised way.
Why the original staging could not make it across the Channel intact remains a mystery, but the intensity and energy coursing through the concert gave at least a hint of the ideas Noble had brought to this extraordinary work. Perhaps most potent was Minerva's silent presence through much of the second half of the opera, shaping events, and monitoring Ulysses' progress to his final reunion with Penelope, as if the husband and wife were two great planets slowly moving into conjunction.
Musically it was all beyond criticism. In the best kind of Monteverdi performance there appears to be a total symbiosis between the text, its setting and the instruments. That is precisely what Christie achieved, with his musicians - eight continuo players, and eight in the main ensemble - handling the expressive twists of the score just as flexibly as the singers.
The cast was a typically young Arts Florissants line-up, a multinational group whose feeling for the style and the language of the work has become totally instinctive. Marijana Mijanovic's compelling, austere Penelope, and Kresimir Spicer's angry, powerful Ulysses were pre-eminent. Olga Pitarch was a fascinating Minerva, extrovert in her shepherd disguise, mysterious in her goddess form. Katalin Karolyi and Zachary Stains made a frisky pair of lovers, Melanto and Eurymachus, and Robert Burt hilariously brought Irus's hunger aria at the beginning of the third act close to being the evening's highlight. A remarkable evening in every respect.
