Britain’s major opera companies allowed last year’s Gluck tercentenary to pass uncelebrated. The Royal Opera’s new version of his most famous stage work makes belated amends; as the title indicates, this is the second incarnation of Gluck’s Orpheus opera, the French-language version he produced for Paris in 1774, 12 years after the original had caused such a sensation at its Vienna premiere.
In the later version Gluck extended his score to full-evening length, adding extra ballet music, and most significantly of all rewrote the role of Orpheus for a high tenor instead of the castrato of the original, providing him with a florid aria to end the first act that is very different from the much simpler, more expressively direct numbers of the original around it. Gluck purists are sometimes rather sniffy about the result, but it is more than a historical curiosity, and the Royal Opera’s decision to stage it must have been conditioned by being able to cast Juan Diego Flórez as Orphée. Though he took a little while to get his voice moving with total freedom, Flórez didn’t disappoint. He delivered that first-act aria, L’espoir renait dans mon âme, with easy mastery of its coloratura, and balanced that against his unadorned sincerity in the most famous number of all, J’ai perdu mon Eurydice.
The production doesn’t require much of Flórez dramatically – other than to wander around looking anguished and bereft – any more than it does of Amanda Forsythe’s brittle, gold-lamé-suited Amour, or Lucy Crowe’s slightly petulant Eurydice. But then it seems a strangely neutral, almost half-hearted staging in general. Co-directed by John Fulljames and Hofesh Shechter, who is also responsible for the choreography that is danced by his own company, there are few ideas. A wicker-man-like effigy of Eurydice is burnt during the first act, and makes a reappearance at the very end of the opera – to indicate what? That what happens in between is all inside Orphée’s head? – while the chorus (the Monteverdi Choir) brandish a lot of what seem to be railway lamps. Otherwise everything is modern-dress neutrality.
Much more of the staging, designed by Conor Murphy, seems concerned with the orchestra, the English Baroque Soloists, who inhabit a midstage platform that can be raised above stage level or dropped below it – for this production the orchestra pit itself provides student standing places – so that the action can take place around or beneath it. It certainly shows off Gluck’s score to vivid orchestral effect: hearing the rasping trio of trombones at the beginning of the second act, you realise why Berlioz admired Gluck so much, and John Eliot Gardiner ensured that the playing was dazzlingly effective. But that shouldn’t be the main focus of a production of Orphée et Eurydice, yet for all the energy in the Shechter company’s presentation of the closing ballet, it was the orchestra that made the biggest impression.
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