Pinchgut Opera brought this year’s season to a grim, murderous close last week with Médée, the gorgeous French Baroque opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Set in the world of Greek myth and based on the 431 BC retelling by Euripides, Médée follows what happens to the hero Jason after he and his Argonauts capture the famous Golden Fleece. Seeking refuge in Corinth, Jason promptly cheats on his sorceress wife, Médée, and plots to marry the Princess of Corinth. His betrayal unleashes a deadly trail of obsession, witchcraft, political machinations, madness and murder that prompts me to reflect that classics are classics for a reason. Netflix, eat your heart out.

Charpentier put the myth to music in 1693 and the score has been given the kiss of life by the impressive historical music team at Pinchgut. As with most Pinchgut productions, this Baroque revival wears relevant, modern-day clothing. Directed by NIDA graduate turned Teatro Real director Justin Way, Médée is set in ominously contemporary times and was performed at the City Recital Hall, Sydney. Way has explained that his artistic vision draws on present-day xenophobia and distrust of governments, so I was unsurprised that his Kingdom of Corinth (designed by Charles Davis) looks like a bleak European business district in winter – a stark, brooding dais flanked by brutalist grey columns and bathed in cold light by Damien Cooper.

It is otherwise bare, save for a giant projection of a stone bust (David Bergman’s video). Whether the face on the bust belongs to the King of Corinth, Jason or Médée is left ambiguous, but the message is clear – in this country, only one person holds the power. The cast is costumed in fittingly conservative suits: the women in block colours with neat hair and co-ordinating handbags, the men in monochrome.

Into this square-edged world comes Catherine Carby’s unhappy Médée, looking freakishly out of place the moment she sets her pointy-booted foot on stage. White-haired like Principal Weems in Tim Burton’s Wednesday and white-faced like Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, Carby’s presence towers over Michael Petruccelli’s relatively normal-looking Jason. You begin to wonder what she ever saw in him – especially when she tries to explain, unsuccessfully, to the patronising king that her occult powers are the real reason for Jason’s heroic success. But her persona is softened by the opening scene, where she plays lovingly with her two sons and confides her anxieties to their nurse figure, Nérine.

The opera is a vehicle for Carby, who performs the tortured Médée with a sense of terrifyingly controlled desolation. Her mezzo-soprano pours through Médée’s fraught journey like a dark wine – rich, complex, sensuously shaped and laced with notes of sweet and bitter. It’s no easy task to portray an infanticidal murderer as a sympathetic figure but Carby does it, making Jason’s betrayal and Médée’s exile so cruel it feels inevitable that she ultimately pulls the trigger, destroying everyone around her. She is well-matched by Petruccelli, whose tenor has a smooth, velvety quality and who sings Jason with richly polished control and a sense of pitch so stable you could smash one of the set’s columns against it. He wafts about the stage in a Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck, blending a hero’s confident stride with just the right amount of hapless celebrity ignorance.

Adrian Tamburini is a standout as the authoritarian King of Corinth. His commanding bass-baritone stretches through all the colours of the conniving monarch, blooming into a deep and thunderous tunnel of bass in his early threats to Médée, and rising to a taut, nasal whine as he realises – too late – that she has beaten him at his own game. Tamburini is also a charismatic physical presence, swaggering in his fur-trimmed suit and dropping his jaw in histrionic shock at Médée’s impudence.

With such rich vocals on display, hearing Carby, Petruccelli and Tamburini on the same stage is a bit like the operatic version of a motor enthusiast walking into a garage full of purring luxury cars.

The king’s daughter, Princess Créuse, is performed by Cathy-Di Zhang. A glamorous figure in all her performances, Zhang’s Princess is a whip-thin, stylish beauty, with long, glossy hair, swaying atop a pair of very high heels. Her voice, fittingly, is a clear, nimble soprano, knowingly beguiling Jason with the siren song of a younger woman. At times I wanted her to be more in time with the orchestra or more in pitch with Petruccelli’s Jason. But maybe when you’re royalty and at the apex of a hot-to-trot love triangle, you can do whatever the hell you want. Her death scene, where she cradles herself in the arms of her father’s still-warm corpse, is very moving.

Rounding out the cast are Andrew Finden as Prince Oronte, singing with solid clarity, and Chloe Lankshear, fresh from featuring in Pinchgut’s recent Women of the Piéta, who plays Nérine as a clear-voiced sympathetic figure. Anna Fraser as Cléone brings dramatic urgency to the opera’s dreadful climax, and Brianna Louwen sings with a silvery soprano as the top-hatted, winged cherub Amour. Maia Andrews plays the seductive “Italienne” with glittering relish, and Louis Hurley and Philip Barton – wearing wigs and skirts as ghostly shades of Médée – make an eerie duo as La Vengeance and La Jalousie. Not named in the main cast but deserving mention is Andrew O’Connor as “an Argive”. After a standout performance in the basso buffo role of Gelone in Pinchgut’s recent production of Orontea, O’Connor’s fine singing makes his brief Act One duet a highlight.

Pinchgut’s chorus, Cantillation, is in top form, mastering their scenes with a strong combination of emotional commitment and well-crafted vocal balance. The excellent Orchestra of the Antipodes delivers yet again, with Pinchgut director Erin Helyard a familiar, sprightly figure conducting energetically from the harpsichord.

While the music is outstanding, confirming Pinchgut’s star quality, I thought more visual action would have better complemented Charpentier’s finely wrought sound. Médée is one of Pinchgut’s more restrained and sombre productions, with movement director Troy Honeysett opting for a visual inertness throughout. This seems a bit of a shame – after all, Médée features stabbings, seduction, sorcery, poisoned clothes, madness and an entire city on fire. A certain amount of stillness may be tasteful and theatrically effective in some operas, but in this Médée it bogs down the narrative and musical pace.

For now, audiences can content themselves with focusing on the musical pleasures. Until recently, Charpentier has been something of an underrated dark horse, pushed to the sidelines by the legacy of his aggressive rival, Jean-Baptiste Lully. Thanks to Lully’s political scheming, Médée was the only public-facing opera Charpentier wrote, so it’s a huge treat his music is now getting the airtime it deserves. 

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