For Toronto classical music lovers, a major reason for staying in town in July is the Toronto Summer Music Festival. For the last two decades, COVID summers excepted, we have enjoyed great music courtesy of TSMF. Based on this opening night show of two Charpentier operas, the 2026 TSMF is off to a most auspicious start.
On the evening of July 9th, a sold-out Koerner Hall audience was treated to a scintillating performance by the returning ensemble Les Arts Florissants, last heard in Toronto two years ago. Founded by American and Buffalo native William Christie way back in 1979, I had the pleasure of having experienced its magic in early music many years ago through live performances as well as its many recordings on the Harmonia Mundi, Erato and Pentatone labels.
Christie brought to TSMF an interesting program – two works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his 1685 opera, coincidentally named Les arts florissants, and his 1686 opera La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, based on the famous Orfeo and Eurydice legend, except that the last act when Orfeo takes Eurydice back to earth is missing, presumed either lost or left unfished by the composer.
Koerner Hall is not a conventional opera house and has no true orchestra pit. Even with the small ensemble placed way upstage and Christie leading from the harpsichord, there was not very much room for sets and action. The Christie ensemble sounded wonderful in the superb Koerner Hall acoustics, but the stage still had to accommodate a large cast, including dancers. With clever blocking, this semi-staged presentation worked well.
More at issue is the actual stage action. In the 21st century, Baroque opera stagings are usually approached from a historically informed perspective rather than attempting to recreate the past in as historically authentic a manner as possible. Baroque musical scores and period instruments that have survived give us a good idea of what music from more than 300 years ago would have sounded like. It is not so with staging, as there is hardly any detailed record of staging practices – we simply don’t know for sure.
Photo Credit: Lucky Tang
La descente d’Orphée aux enfers was part of the double bill that opened the 2026 TSMF
Contemporary Baroque opera stage direction, therefore, tends to favour modern staging aesthetics rather than attempting to recreate the past. One can easily see this approach employed by opera companies that specialize in Baroque operas. Often, there is little or no attempt to use period costumes, and the costumes in these two Charpentier works are essentially contemporary. The physical movements are high energy and brisk. While I understand the rationale, I can’t help but wish the staging were less frenetic and more suited to the solemnity of the scores and seriousness of the allegorical stories being told.
Les arts florissants, the opera, is a celebration of the arts, personified by Music (Camille Chopin), Poetry (Sarah Fleiss), Painting (Bastien Rimondi) and Architecture (Sydney Frodsham) and represented by Peace (Josipa Bilić), which have power to sway the gods and to conquer evil, in this case personified by a character named Discord (Olivier Bergeron).
It’s very much an ensemble show with a large cast with attractive voices, all members of Le Jardin des Voix. Sung in French, the English surtitles were projected in texts that were a tad too small, not to mention too dimly lit, for comfort. Someone must have complained, as I noticed that it was more brightly lit after the intermission! The short piece was so well presented that the 41 minutes went by in a flash.
The second work, La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, was on more familiar ground at least in terms of the drama, although I confess that while I know the Gluck opera, I am less familiar with the Charpentier version, having only heard it on disc in recent memory. By an interesting coincidence, the Charpentier will be staged this coming season, also in Koerner Hall, by Opera Atelier. As Rena Roussin points out in the program notes, the story of Orphée is also a celebration of the power of art – in this case his singing that sway the gods in Hades. It makes a lot of sense to program these two operas together.
All in all, it was a marvelous start to the 2026 Toronto Summer Music Festival.
Photo Credit: Lucky Tang
Richard Pittsinger (Orphee) and Camille Chopin (Eurydice) in the presentation by Les Arts Florissants
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