Aaron Sheehan / Rezensionen

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.