BOSTON — To say that Monteverdi has swallowed the Boston Early Music Festival this year would not be quite right. That would, after all, take a considerable gulp.
As usual, there is a teeming array of concerts and recitals at this biennial weeklong event, one of the most ambitious festivals of its kind in the world; exhibitions of instruments, books, scores and recordings; and institutional and corporate displays. All of this is apart from some 120 “fringe concerts and colleague events.”
Still, there has been no mistaking the main events, whose title, “Monteverdi Trilogy,” refers to the lavishly staged productions of the composer’s three surviving operas — “Orfeo,” “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse” and “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” — at the Boston University Theater. And there has been even more Monteverdi: a performance of the composer’s 1610 Vespers, for example, on Thursday. Even for a New Yorker sated in the composer of late, this is something special.
Not that multiple opera productions are new to the festival. In 2013, a grand staging of Handel’s “Almira” was set against a double bill of Charpentier, modestly but intelligently conceived. But the sheer weight of the Monteverdi venture — the number of performers and costumes, the amount of performance time (some 10 hours total), let alone rehearsal time — is remarkable.
As are the results, to judge from the two productions seen so far: “Poppea” in its debut, on Tuesday, and “Ulisse” in its second performance, on Wednesday. (“Orfeo” has its first performance on Saturday evening.) Most of the vocal soloists are excellent, and the orchestra, with the lutenists Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs as music directors and the violinist Robert Mealy as concertmaster, is superb.
It is striking to encounter the two late Monteverdi operas in juxtaposition, as much for their differences as for their similarities.
Each sets the scene with allegorical characters. Virtue holds its own against Love in “Ulisse” (1640), as a faithful Penelope awaits the return of the noble Ulysses, 20 years absent. But Virtue suffers an ignominious defeat in “Poppea” (1643), the lascivious Nero tossing aside his queen, Ottavia, in favor of the sexpot Poppea. No love, whether licit or ill-, could find more beautiful expression than the one between Nero and Poppea, in a sensual, shockingly cynical closing duet, “Pur ti miro” (“I gaze at you”).
Gilbert Blin, the stage director and set designer, brings both of these rival attitudes to life, showing that each opera is as sound dramatically as it is musically. More than the title characters, the polar opposites Penelope and Nero are the driving forces, and Mr. Blin draws exceptional performances in those roles.
The mezzo-soprano Mary-Ellen Nesi, a picture of restraint as Penelope, is almost combative in nurturing her despair. David Hansen, a powerhouse countertenor, grows increasingly unhinged as Nero in a performance that was wholly admirable on Tuesday except for his tendency to shade his tone flat on occasion.
The soprano Amanda Forsythe, a festival favorite, only enhances that status with a seductive portrayal of Poppea, and Colin Balzer, a tenor, proves a sturdy Ulysses.
In one of many role doublings, Mr. Balzer also sings Human Frailty, an allegorical figure Monteverdi seems to identify with Ulysses. The Monteverdi scholar Ellen Rosand, on the other hand, in a pre-opera lecture, identified Ulysses with Monteverdi himself, returning after years away from opera to demonstrate his unshaken might. Youthful powers are richly displayed not only in “Orfeo” (1607) but also in the magnificent 1610 Vespers, which Mr. Stubbs led here in Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory. The Green Mountain Project has made the Vespers a treasured staple in New York in recent years, setting a standard in many respects unsurpassed even by top-flight international groups, like John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir recently in Carnegie Hall.
For starters, the work’s magic, including those echo effects between voices, strings and cornettos, is more available in a reverberant church setting than in a concert auditorium. Then, too, the failure to include plainchant interpolations that would have been appropriate to the season deprives the work of some of its majesty and pace. And if those were not to be included (even if they were), why an intermission?
It all smacked a little of routine, something that could not be said of the operas. Still, the performances of both vocal soloists and instrumentalists were wonderful, especially those of the tenors Mr. Balzer and Zachary Wilder and the baritone Christian Immler (who was also an imposing Seneca in “Poppea”).
Other notable events included a three-concert mini-festival of German organ works at the First Lutheran Church of Boston on Thursday. In the third of those concerts, John Scott, the esteemed organist and director of music at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York, played items from northern Germany. After touching on relative unknowns, like Hieronymus and Jacob Praetorius, he finished with a magnificent set of works by Dietrich Buxtehude, whose work he has long championed.
Those Praetoriuses are not to be confused with the better-known Michael, who was represented in a tribute concert at Jordan Hall on Thursday, “Three, Four & Twenty Lutes.” This was a revival of a 1989 concert organized by Mr. O’Dette and Patrick O’Brien, presented in memory of Mr. O’Brien, who died last July.
All 20 of the lutenists who variously populated the stage studied with Mr. O’Brien at one time or another. They were joined in lovely and amusing vocal works by guitar-strumming soloists (Ellen Hargis and Nell Snaidas, sopranos, and Danielle Reutter-Harrah, mezzo-soprano) and singers from the BEMF Young Artists Training Program (including Mr. Stubbs’s 10-year-old daughter, Hannah Rose).
In other concerts at Jordan Hall, the violinist Monica Huggett and the harpsichordist Alexander Weimann joined in Bach sonatas and solo works on Wednesday (Mr. Weimann excellent in the “Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue” in D minor; Ms. Huggett, though otherwise fine, a bit tentative in the Fugue from the Unaccompanied Sonata in G minor). And on Tuesday, Philippe Pierlot gave a viola da gamba recital notable for the inclusion of three pieces by a living composer, Bernard Foccroulle.
Nor was that the only entry in the festival trying to redefine early music. The massed lutenists played as encore Henry Lodge’s “Red Pepper: A Spicy Rag” (1910).
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