SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Director: Dieter Dorn
Sets and costumes: Jürgen Rose

Cast:

Orfeo: Elisabeth Kulman
Euridice: Genia Kühmeier
Amore: Christiane Karg
 

 

Elisabeth Kulman as Orfeo  © Hermann und Clärchen Baus

Wolfgang Rihm's fascinating new opera Dionysos, which was premeried at this year's Salzburg Festival, represents everything that the ultra-swank summer music fest should be, but isn't: intellectually challenging, and aurally and visually stimulating.

But the new production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, which opened just a few days later, represents everything that Salzburg is, but shouldn't be: undeniably chic and elegant to look at, but endlessly bland and dull in terms of musical and artistic merit. Gluck's simple and affecting masterpiece has become something of a rarity on the opera stage nowadays, so much so that any new outing must surely be weclomed.

Orfeo ed Euridice has been performed a total 27 times in Salzburg, largely in the 1930s, when there were two separate productions.Herbert von Karajan also conducted it in 1948 and 1949 with the likes of Sena Jurinac and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. But the last fully staged version was in 1959 and only in 1990 was it given a concert performance under John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir.

For this latest production, conductor Riccardo Muti and director Dieter Dorn have chosen the shorter, more intimate Italian version of the score which Gluck wrote for Vienna in 1762 over the later, more familiar French adaptation.
And Muti has included all the ballet music that is traditionally cut. All the more puzzling, then, that instead of choosing an authentic period-instrument band, Muti opted to have the world's most reactionary orchestra in the pit: the Vienna Philharmonic. And Salzburg's cavernous Grosses Festspielhaus was chosen as the venue.

It's as if the festival organisers wanted to torpedo the project from the start. Performing baroque opera on modern instruments need not be an anachronism. Even the most traditionalist orchestras and conductors nowadays seem willing to take on board the findings of early music specialists and scholars with regard to tempo, articulation and instrumentation. Not so Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic, who clog up the tempi and smother Gluck's tender and airy score with so much so treacly vibrato that the result is simply a turgid and soporific mess.

Elisabeth Kulman, as Orfeo, is a promising young Austrian mezzo, but her  dusky voice failed to carry in the vast auditorium, weighed down by Muti's leaden conducting. Soprano Genia Kühmeier, a native of Salzburg, lent Euridice a sweet, rose-petalled voice, but like Amore, sung with silvery sparkle by German soprano Christiane Karg, the role is simply too slim and slight to carry the evening.

The sets by Jürgen Rose are infinitely elegant and pleasing on the eye, especially the bright, sun-lit beaches of Elysium, which made use of the full cinemascope size of the stage. But Dieter Dorn's direction could hardly be described as inspired. During the overture, the two newlyweds are seen in a loving embrace, Orfeo in a somewhat unflattering trouser suit and Euridice in a sack-like red frock. As the overture ends and the first scene begins, Euridice dies by sinking into a hole in the stage floor, leaving Orfeo holding only her red dress in his arms.

The underworld is sulphurically lit, but the depiction of the chorus of furies and shades as a mass of writhing bodies is just corny. In the final scene, when Amore brings Euridice and Orfeo together for the second time, the chorus turns into a crowd of warring married couples - including, just for the sake of political correctness, a gay couple. Married life, Dorn is telling the lovers, and us, in an unbearingly schoolma'am-ish way, is not all a bed of roses. You don't say.

Simon Morgan