Orphée et Eurydice

Orphee et Eurydice(Orpheus and Eurydice) is to me Gluck's masterwork, it has the most believable and poignant story of any of Gluck's operas with much emotion and it contains his most beautiful and consistently memorable music. This Opera Australia production is wonderful and one of the best among the DVD competition with many things that will delight opera enthusiasts. The production values look great, the lighting is very expressive, the costumes are appropriate and well-tailored(yes even Amore looking like a street boy) but the most striking were in the sets; the underworld has such a colourful and haunting atmosphere and the cube and silver landscape gives the Elysian fields scene an ethereal touch. The staging is nicely done with much emotional power done with subtlety, and while it is creative it is always true to the libretto and does nothing distasteful. This is especially true in the quite intoxicating Dance of the Furies, and really the only real let-down was some(but not all) of the chemistry between Orphee and Eurydice looking a touch awkward in the last act. The video directing is unobtrusive and expansive and allows the intimacy when needed and the sound is not the most resonant but it doesn't hamper the singing or music at all. There is little wrong with the musical values either, Marco Guidarini's conducting is always solid and sympathetic to the drama, the orchestra play with idiomatic style and depth and the chorus sing and characterise beautifully, doing grieving and erotic equally well. Really liked the performances too, especially with David Hobson in one of his best performances on DVD. It is a very thoughtful interpretation that is capable of much sensitivity, poise and intensity and he tackles the challenging role of Orphee(part of it being that Gluck is hard to sing in general but also that he is on stage almost all of the time) bravely and succeeds- lots of lovely sounds, a real understanding of the style, good musicianship and phrasing and his crucial arias are sung with grace- with only some unidiomatic French that wasn't quite so good. Miriam Gormley was the other standout, her voice the most pleasing and smooth of the cast and you can't take your eyes off her, she is on stage almost as much as Hobson and her presence has a lot of fire and athleticism, not being afraid to take risks. Eurydice's music is mostly in Act 3 and the performance of Amanda Thane makes it worth the wait, she makes for a poignant Eurydice and her voice has power and a dark beauty while not getting in the way of flexibility. In conclusion, a wonderful production from Opera Australia. 9.5/10 Bethany Cox

German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck hit his musical high watermark with this renowned 1762 opera, famous for bringing a far greater sense of dramatic structure to opera seria than previous Italianate works. Twelve years after its debut, Gluck revised the work to suit French tastes in the 1774 Paris Opera production by adjusting the male lead role from a castrato to a high tenor and adding dance sequences. Stefanos Lazaridis' 1993 Opera Australia production adapts that Paris Opera production and further adds decidedly contemporary elements by staging it on a modern minimalist set. Now finally on DVD in 2006, the result is arresting to the eye and often to the ear, though casting poses some problems for the surging melodrama of this relatively brief opera.

Despite the co-billing of the title, it is really Orfeo that dominates as he has the lion's share of the arias in the work. Australian tenor David Hobson is something of a pop icon in his native country thanks to his performance as Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann's colorful 1990 production of "La Bohème". Although he often sings meltingly and has the requisite good looks, he lends a too-callow and often wooden presence as the desperately grieving widower, and the depth of the character's despair appears to escape him. This vacuity extends to some of his arias which are sung in a rather monochromatic manner and shallow timbre unsuitable for such a dramatic piece. On the other hand, soprano Amanda Thane certainly lends vocal power to Euridice, even though her impressive singing is mainly relegated to the third act. The challenge is that she and Hobson have very little chemistry as she often moves rather awkwardly onstage when she needs to come across as ethereal.

Fellow soprano Miriam Gormley has a smooth voice and lends a becalming though unrelenting presence in the small mythic role of Amore. She at least manages a fierceness of intent when she removes a knife from the suicidal Orfeo, a dramatically urgent moment in a production with precious few of them. A major plus is the seamless melding of the Australian Opera Chorus and Meryl Tankard's dance troupe as the Furies, whether providing the mournful chorus to Orfeo's grieving in the first act or writhing in erotically charged torment on a seemingly insurmountable wall in Hades in the "Dance of the Furies". The striking use of color is most effective in the depiction of the underworld, and the massive Plexiglas cube against a silvery landscape makes for a powerful image of the Elysian Fields.

Conductor Marco Guidarini does a solid job leading the opera orchestra, although the recording quality on the Kultur DVD can be rather lacking at times. Regardless of the creative staging, the area most lacking for me in this production is how the principals fail to pull off the combustible intensity necessary to make the overall dramatic situation palpable. As a point of comparison, I was fortunate enough to see Robert Carsen's stripped-down production of the original 1762 opera this past spring at the Chicago Lyric Opera with countertenor David Daniels and soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian in the title roles. Both are such charismatic performers that it mattered little that they were performing on what seemed to be a rocky moonscape. The intractable need the characters have for each other is what fails to convince in the Opera Australia production.

As soon as I finished the DVD I had rented from netflix.com, I went to amazon.com to buy a copy; every one of the half-dozen previous purchasers who rated the production had given it five stars - the maximum on that site. All those who had commented went overboard; and I added my own comment, which was that I agreed with everything the previous writers had said in praise of the experience. The opera is a great masterpiece, with a near-constant flow of gorgeous melody; the libretto is sung in French but the excellent sub-titles make sure that one knows what is going on at every moment, and the drama is irresistible from first to last. It is the music-making, though, which makes this production take off, and the acting and the dancing - in other words, everyone on stage and in the orchestra pit performs superbly. If this is typical of the work of Australian Opera then what goes on inside the Sydney Opera House is as breathtaking as the landmark building itself.