Press and Media Links for the Minnesota Opera Production of Orfeo Ed Eurydice
Lee and Production team talk about the show
David Daniels singing 'Che Puro Ciel'
Star Tribune
Wonder in the underworld
This new production of the Gluck opera, directed by Lee Blakeley for Minnesota Opera, is dazzling and inventive.
By LARRY FUCHSBERG, Special to the Star Tribune
Beginning with Jacopo Peri, whose 1600 "Eurydice" is the earliest surviving opera, more than 60 composers have been drawn to the ancient story. But none of their scores has had the staying power of Christoph Willibald Gluck's "Orpheus and Eurydice," first produced in 1762. With his librettist, Ranieri de' Calzabigi, Gluck pruned away inessentials, creating a concise, fast-moving meditation on love, loss, identity, impulse control and, not least, the power of art.
All these themes are given their due in the Minnesota Opera's dazzlingly inventive, superbly integrated new production, which launched the company's new season Saturday at the Ordway Center in St. Paul. Stage director Lee Blakeley and colleagues -- set/costume designer Adrian Linford, choreographer Arthur Pita, lighting designer Jenny Cane -- set the action in a baroque theater, a venue not unsuited to an artist's journey.
With its multiple prosceniums and antique stage equipment, its conspicuous use of masks and in-your-face lighting, the production repeatedly calls attention to its own theatricality -- nowhere more than at the end of Act Two, when, as the title characters take leave of Elysium, music, masks and much else converge to create a macabre, brilliantly unsettling moment. This same theatrical self-consciousness is also manifest in the production's most controversial feature. Late in the opera, to ballet music usually cut, Team Blakeley supplies what amounts to a Greek satyr play: a bawdy burlesque, performed as comic relief after a tragic trilogy, that often parodied the story just concluded.
In this case, Pita's masterful choreography, impeccably realized by the Zenon Dance Company, retells the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as they watch, uncomfortably, and are watched in turn by the audience. For me, this is a dramaturgical home run, neatly subverting Gluck's obligatory happy ending and introducing a latter-day wrinkle that freshens the myth.
The production is no less arresting musically. With his first, searing cries of "Eurydice," countertenor David Daniels -- the first countertenor cast as Orpheus at New York's Metropolitan -- forges a close connection with his listeners that deepens as the performance proceeds. (Operagoers still leery of countertenors owe themselves an evening in Daniels' company; his voice is rich, supple, hauntingly expressive.) To Eurydice, soprano Susanna Phillips brings extraordinary warmth and dramatic focus; it's a pity Gluck doesn't give her more to do. Angela Mortellaro's Cupid-like Amore manages to be both sprightly and disquieting. Leading a nearly vibrato-less St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, conductor Harry Bicket balances pit and stage judiciously (though the offstage band is sometimes too faint). The chorus, crucial in this opera, sings grandly.
Minn Post
By Michael Anthony | Published Mon, Sep 27 2010 10:28 am
Legend has it that after seeing a performance of Gluck's "Orphee," the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau left the Paris Opera with tears streaming down his face.
No one leaving the Ordway Center Saturday night, having seen the same opera in its original version of 1762, "Orpheus and Eurydice," in a new production by Minnesota Opera, appeared to be having quite as visceral a reaction as did Rousseau who, admittedly, enjoyed a good cry more than most people. This attractive new production, which kicked off the company's 48th season, offered a great deal, nonetheless.
It boasts, for one thing, the compelling presence onstage of David Daniels, who by now is surely the world's most revered countertenor in a role that has become for him a trademark. If it could be said that the English mezzo Janet Baker owned the role of Orpheus in the 1960s and '70s, then that honor for the past decade has been held by Daniels, who will return to the Met later this season to sing the part in a production that, at least when first seen, had him costumed like a rock star, playing a guitar with a sequined shoulder strap.
His costume here was more attuned to the 18th century, and the performance was both intensely dramatic and vocally accomplished. Where many countertenors emit a steely sound that can be off-putting, Daniels makes his wide-ranging, agile, warm-colored voice seem natural. The character's grief over the death of his beloved Eurydice in the opening scene came across with touching poignancy Saturday night as did his elation on her recovery. Near the end, his delivery of Orpheus' great lament, "Che faro senza Eurydice?" seemed the musical embodiment of the noble simplicity that was always Gluck's goal.
With early-music expert Harry Bicket leading the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in a sensitive and incisive performance in the pit, the production — staged by the English director Lee Blakeley with intriguing sets and costumes by Adrian Linford — offers a thoughtful retelling of the timeless tale of art's power to overcome death. Putting the action in an 18th-century court theater, with Orpheus wandering backstage in search of Eurydice or some more complete version of himself, Blakeley suggests, moreover, an ambiguous, uneasy relationship between illusion and reality that we don't usually encounter in this work.
He suggests, too, in one of the production's several evocative images — chorus members slowly dropping from the ceiling into the afterworld, the supposedly blissful Elysian Fields, and forced to wear masks — that life after death is not so serene as myth and religion promise. And he solves the problem that attends most productions of "Orpheus": what to do with those boring dances at the end. Using the dancers of the excellent Zenon Dance Company and the choreography of Arthur Pita, Blakeley evokes the old theatrical-operatic tradition of the afterpiece, which satirizes the story we've just seen.Here it's funny and yet disturbing. Eurydice, sung so exquisitely in this production by Susanna Phillips, watches the dance and is herself disturbed by it, as are we in the audience.
And here are a few more credits in what turned out to be an unusually engaging season opener: Angela Mortellaro's sprightly, deftly sung Amore and the immaculate, full-bodied singing of the chorus.