Monteverdi and Berio

This weekend Harvard and the Juilliard School of Music collaborated on a Loeb production of two "experimental" works of musical theatre, one from the 1620's and one from the 1960's. The first of these, Claudio Monteverdi's II Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, is a kind of stage cantata. A narrator describes and comments on a fight between Tancredi and Clorinda, while they act out the battle, occasionally singing a phrase or two themselves. In this production, Robert Jones as the narrator, Alan Titus as Tancredi, and Evelyn Mandac as Clorinda all sang excellently, although some of Miss Mandac's entrances were a little breathy (possibly because she had to sing them while dying). The instrumentalists (string quartet, double bass and harpsichord) under the direction of Luciano Berio put life and warmth into a potentially very dull score.

The visual effect of II Combattimento was less satisfactory. Director Ian Strasfogel made a noble effort to overcome the difficulties inherent in staging a pantomine which has to move as slowly as its verbal description; but the rather stylized battle he gave Titus and Miss Mandac was unimaginative and full of gaps in which nothing in particular happened. The abstract slides projected on a blackboard behind the performers added little or nothing, and the sunset that appeared behind Clorinda's dying speech was downright embarrassing.

Berio's Passaggio had an immediate and ferocious impact which the stylized manner of the Monteverdi could not even approach. The multilingual text was mostly unintelligible, but apparently Passaggio portrays the "passage" of a single character, called "She," at odds with and seemingly at the mercy of a heartless and mindless society, represented by choruses next to the stage and at the sides of the house. The hostility of the chorus was evident from the moment its opening hisses, murmurs, and shouts began to fill the darkened theatre, while both Her helplessness and humanness came through largely from Miss Mandac's presence on stage. She turned in a superb performance, as she passed from a small chair to a prison cell, a drab bedroom and, finally, a huge bare, rehearsal stage, she movingly conveyed everything from lyrical calm to the hopeless despair which reduced her by the end to shouting "Go away!" at the entire theatre. Berio's score creating exactly the right atmosphere of darkness, supporting Miss Mandac's more lyrical lines with subdued moans and becoming thick and black in combination with the choruses' threatening noises. Berio's attempt to involve the audience in the action by extending it into the house was as nearly successful as such attempts can be, adding to the effect of Passaggio as a powerful piece of "total theatre."