✭✭✭✭✩ / ✭✭✭✭✩

by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, directed by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan & Stéphane Facco

Les Arts Florissants, Toronto Summer Music, Koerner Hall, Toronto

July 9, 2026

La Musique: “Fleurissez doctes arts, la discorde est bannie”

Toronto Summer Music 2026 opened with the French Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants presenting a double bill of its namesake 1685 opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Charpentier’s 1686 opera La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers. It was a tremendous evening that demonstrated how pioneers like William Christie and his ensemble are masters in demonstrating the continuing vitality of Baroque music.

Most Torontonians’ experience of the operas of Charpentier will be the many performances of his works by Opera Atelier from his Actéon in 1987, 1993, 1998, 2005 and 2018 to Médée in 2002 and 2017 to, most recently, David et Jonathas in 2025. OA has chosen a very specific style of presentation where not just the music but the staging, dance, costumes and scenery are all historically informed.

The evening began with Les Arts florissants which was played as a kind of introduction to La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers. Christie and his ten-member orchestra were situated upstage, leaving the remainder of the space in front of and to the side of them, as well as the narrow space behind them, free for the singers and dancers.

One noted from the first entrance of the ten singers and three dancers (a fourth dancer was indisposed) the differences between Les Arts Florissants and Opera Atelier. In OA productions, the stage performers wear period-inspired costumes. For AF, they wore contemporary costumes — the men with suits and suspenders and even sneakers, the women in a variety of one-piece and two-piece outfits. For OA members of the chorus or the corps de ballet wear costumes of the same style. For AF they wore individualized costumes. Most importantly, for OA the corps de ballet is a separate entity from the singers, while for AF the singers must also dance. Martin Chaix has choreographed the two operas in such a way that the singers are in almost constant motion. They perform a repeated, complex set of hand and arm gestures and patterns of footwork in unison while singing. The dancers (who do not sing) essentially execute elaborate variations on movements of the singers.

For those attuned to OA’s unified style, the contrast in AF between the music and the costumes and movement was initially jarring. Nevertheless, one soon grew used to it and saw it as yet another way of making baroque opera come alive.

Charpentier designated Les Arts florissants as an idylle en musique. Allegorical characters representing La Musique, La Poésie, La Peinture and L’Architecture debate which of them is the supreme art to a group of soldiers. The piece also functions as a panegyric to Louis XIV since due to him these arts have flourished.

Directors Marie Lambert-Le Bihan and Stéphane Facco have reinterpreted this idyll as a type of modern garden party with the soldiers replaced with a group of young people who could be mistaken for graduate students simply enjoying themselves. While La Musique’s white dress does have black f-holes on its back like a violin, AF’s current production gives the impression that this is not an allegorical debate but that members of the party have begun this debate as an intellectual exercise.

Nevertheless, once all four arts have made their case, La Discorde, who has been lurking apart from the group, bursts forth, rallies them to war and casts the idyll into chaos. Eventually, La Paix, at the behest of Louis XIV, restores order and harmony both literal and symbolic.

Lambert-Le Bihan and Facco make Les Arts florissants visually appear as a prelude to Orphée. Richard Pittsinger and Camille Chopin, who will play Orphée and Euridice in the second opera, are already the only two singers clad all in white in Les Arts. Doubling Chopin as La Musique in the first opera, gives her role symbolic resonance in the second. Near the beginning of Les Arts we see that Pittsinger and Olivier Bergeron, who clad all in black plays La Discorde, get into some dispute that leads to pushing before it is stopped. This seems to prefigure Pittsinger’s role as Orphée in the second opera who must dispute verbally with the entirely black-clad Pluton, ruler of Hades.

La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers feels like a continuation of Les Arts florissants since it starts with a party, the celebration of the marriage of Orphée and Euridice. Unlike Gluck’s versions of this myth in his Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), Charpentier depicts the marriage of Orphée and Euridice and the prelude to Euridice’s death. Apollon counsels Orphée to descend to the underworld to plead with Pluton for Euridice’s return. Perhaps influenced by Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending (1957), the chorus gives Orphée a leather jacket for his perilous journey.

Once in Hades, Orphée’s music charms three of its three most tormented denizens — Ixion, Tantalus and Tityus — and Pluton’s consort Proserpine, who convinces Pluton to relent and allow Euridice to return to life with Orphée. Pluton gives Orphée the famous caution not to look back at her. Here, the opera ends with the couple’s departure and a unique emphasis on the inhabitants of the Underworld wishing that Orphée could remain with them since his music makes their pain bearable: “Tant que nous garderons un souvenir si doux / Le bonheur des Enfers rendra le Ciel jaloux”.

Because Charpentier does not treat the rest of the story, of Orphée’s looking back and losing Euridice, some have supposed that Charpentier may have composed a third act. At present, the answer is unknown, but dramatically the work as it exists is still satisfying since the longing of the condemned for Orphée to remain serves as the ultimate praise for the power of music.

Directors Marie Lambert-Le Bihan and Stéphane Facco stage the two operas with a fine use of minimalist style. The only furniture is a table and two chairs. Otherwise, the main props are red-coloured cords and white sheets. The sheets serve as blankets for picnics in both operas and for Euridice’s winding sheet in Orphée. In the Les Arts the directors have La Peinture drape himself in the sheets as if with canvasses and have one sheet held up. Behind this performers create shadows although the shadowplay itself could be much more imaginative.

We first see the red cords in Les Arts when La Discorde stirs up the crowd and a dancer (Andrea Scarfi) starts literally whipping the groups into a fury. In Orphée, Orphée has to enter Hades by crossing the fiery river Phlegethon which the troupe represents by undulating red, stage-width cords. Later, Orphée meets Ixion, Tantalus and Tityus, who are each bound by red cords and are further tied to red leads held by Scarfi, echoing his role in Les Arts. As Orphée’s music soothes the pains of the three sufferers, they gradually loosen their cords and free themselves from the dancer’s leads. It is an excellent demonstration of how the simple means can have great symbolic impact.

The singers for the production are all members of Le Jardin des Voix, a group selected through international auditions to join Les Arts Florissants for its world tours. The present ensemble includes singers from Europe and North and South America. The members are given a chance for their voice to shine, but inevitably some roles are much larger than others.

The most salient role in the current double bill is that of Orphée sung by American haute-contre Richard Pittsinger. An haute-contre is not a counter-tenor but rather a very high lying tenor. Pittsinger has a gorgeous, golden-toned voice and calm, delicate demeanour that make it self-evident that even those in hell should find their pains soothed by his singing. At the same time, Pittsinger effectively conveys Orphée’s own suffering through his subtly plangent tone.

French soprano Camille Chopin plays La Musique in Les Arts and Euridice in Orphée, providing a significant link between the two works. She sings with a rich, bright, colourful voice, perfect as a symbol of music and as a Euridice, who is frequently said to be like a flower who has just bloomed (“Cette naissante fleur ne faisait que d’éclore”). Chopin depicts a similar joie de vivre in both characters, in Euridice right up until she is bitten.

The principal female role in Les Arts is that of La Paix, here gloriously sung by Croatian soprano Josipa Bilić. Bilić sings with a purity and clarity of tone much sought after in early music that makes her a perfect embodiment of an ideal above all worldly strife.

Québécois baritone Olivier Bergeron’s main role is that of La Discorde in Les Arts. He has a fine, rich voice and is a forceful actor, but the volume he produces does not always equal the rage he depicts. As Pluton, Colombian bass Kevin Arboleda-Oquendo lends an impressive sepulchral sound to the King of the Underworld. He makes the moment when Pluton relinquishes his implacable stance toward Orphée a highpoint of the opera.

In both operas the choral singing of the vocal ensemble was breathtakingly sublime.

Dancers American Claire Graham and Italian Andrea Scarfi deserve particular mention for the power and physicality of their performances that seem to heighten and embody all the strength of the chorus around them.

My one difficulty with the presentation was the place of the orchestra behind the singers and dancers. I much prefer, as with Opera Atelier, to hear the singers over the orchestra rather than to hear the orchestra through the singers. Whenever Chaix had the troupe take a turn behind the orchestra the increased audibility of the orchestra was notable and one could much more readily appreciate the perfection of their playing. Yet, Christie has used this orientation of orchestra and performers for this double-bill since its premiere last year in Thiré, France, and it will doubtless continue this way throughout the current tour.

In any case, it was wonderful to see these two pieces, both new to Toronto, performed with such insight and beauty. Opera Atelier will present its first ever production of La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers in October this year, and for those lucky enough to have seen the Les Arts florissants’ production, there should be much food for discussion.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Singers of Le Jardin des Voix with Camille Chopin as Euridice and Richard Pittsinger as Orphée in white, © 2025 Miguel Lorenzo; Olivier Bergeron as La Discorde, © 2026 Lucky Tang; Josipa Bilić as La Paix held aloft by Tom Godefroid and Andrea Scarfi with Camille Chopin in background, © 2026 Lucky Tang; Bastien Rimondi as Orphée (in leather jacket) and ensemble, © 2025 Julien Gazeau; Richard Pittsinger as Orphée and Camille Chopin as Euridice in white, © 2026 Lucky Tang.

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