Orphée et Eurydice, Royal Opera House, review: impressive but not ground-breaking

Of one thing there can be no question: in this new production of Gluck's most celebrated work, John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists make glowingly wonderful music, delicately coloured and economical in means yet richly expressive and vibrantly energetic.

The ‘neo-classical’ label may hang heavily round Gluck’s neck, but Gardiner and his crew don’t let it inhibit them, and the eloquent flute and oboe obbligatos alone are worth the price of the ticket.

Beyond that, I have reservations.

Gardiner has chosen the opera’s later, longer and less familiar French version, devised by Gluck to fulfil courtly Parisian protocols. Today, given the relatively thin and static nature of the drama, it drags, with the extended dance sequences seeming especially pointless.

Orphée was Juan Diego Florez, taking the role for the first time on stage. It is always a pleasure to hear singing as technically expert as his, and to be reminded that he can do more than churn out tiresome Rossinian rat-a-tat-tat.

Although he isn’t the sort of high tenor Gluck intended - something drier, lighter and sweeter than his Hispanic plangency is required: Mark Padmore in pole position - he gave an impressively committed performance, predictably dispatching his florid aria at the climax of Act I with tremendous bravura, but also strikingly charging ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice’ (‘Che faro’ in the original Italian) with bitter anger rather than elegiac resignation.

His outpourings of grief were feelingly declaimed; I only wish more of the text had come across - like his impassioned Eurydice Lucy Crowe, he works hard at the French, but it doesn’t roll out clearly.

Co-directed by John Fulljames and the choreographer Hofesh Shechter, the staging is agreeably conventional and untricksy.

Conor Murphy’s setting is neutral and unspecific, dominated by movable ceiling panels pitted with circular holes through which light shines and a vaguely mid 20th-century peasant look to the clothing.

A Balkan flavour marks some of Shechter’s dances, which are mostly of a shambolic nature, doing neither his cutting-edge reputation nor Gluck’s shapely lucidity any favours.

The only notable innovation was the presence of standing audience in the orchestra pit and the transfer of Gardiner and his band to the stage, where they both rise above the action on a pillared platform and sink below ground level to suggest the River Styx.

Otherwise there’s nothing to shock or outrage, but nothing very illuminating or uplifting either.

Until 3 October. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; www.roh.org.uk