This recording was
produced in association with the Glyndebourne
performances of the opera which formed
part of Dame Janet Baker’s farewell
to the operatic stage. Here, the recording
is issued as edited highlights on one
CD.
The virtues and disadvantages
of the recording are well known. Glyndebourne
decided to use the Italian Ricordi Edition,
based largely on the version Berlioz
made for mezzo-soprano. It thus corresponds
to no known version by Gluck, but conflates
the ‘best bits’ from his own Italian
and French versions (the latter, of
course, written for haut-contre rather
than castrato). Conductor Raymond Leppard
included rather more of Gluck’s ballet
music than usual and this proved one
of the complete recording’s additional
attractions as Leppard’s handling of
the dance sections is assured and dramatic.
Janet Baker’s performance
in the title role is as stunning as
ever. But this was her farewell to the
operatic stage and I could have wished
she had recorded the role earlier on
in her career. But there are still great
moments. In the highlights we are deprived
of her cries of Euridice in the opening
scene. But ‘Addio, addio, o miei sospiri’
is brilliantly done. This virtuoso aria
has a dubious place in the Gluck canon,
but here Baker makes light of the virtuoso
elements to form an emotional and appealing
performance. As Amore, Elizabeth Gale
is charming and perfectly adequate,
but somehow I wanted more. It did not
help that, rather unfairly perhaps,
I found her vibrato a little intrusive.
A drawback of this
disc of highlights is the way the opera
has been edited down. I felt that in
Act 1, skipping directly from Orfeo’s
rather short, ‘Chiamo il mio ben cosi’
directly to Amore’s ‘Gli sguardi trattieni’
was too uncomfortable. The first Act
as presented here is an assemblage of
musical highlights which fails to give
much sense of Gluck’s dramatic sense.
This is a shame as Leppard’s account
of the opening sinfonia is full of drama.
Things are better in
Act II, where we are treated to a satisfactory
dramatic sequence as Orfeo charms the
furies guarding the Elysian Fields.
The Glyndebourne chorus are on strong
form here and Baker’s emotionally powerful
Orfeo rightly triumphs. Elisabeth Speiser’s
Euridice is rather a disappointment
and I found her only adequate. Her role
is heavily cut in the highlights so
that the surviving two items opening
the Act simply form a prelude to Baker’s
haunting and concentrated account of
‘Che faro’, but sense of the drama is
lost.
The disc concludes
a sequence of final choruses and ballets.
Whilst Leppard’s handling of these is
masterly, given that Gluck’s opera had
to be filleted down to fit onto a single
disc, I felt that we could usefully
have lost some ballet and gained a little
more of Gluck’s drama.
This is probably not
a disc suitable for somebody wanting
to explore this opera for the first
time, too much of Gluck’s fine sense
of classical structure is lost as the
drama is reduced to a series of musical
highlights. But what fine music making
it is; certainly this is a disc for
someone wanting a memento of Dame Janet’s
Orfeo without adding yet another complete
version to the library shelves.
Robert Hugill
see also
Christoph
Willibald GLUCK (1714-1787)
Opera
Explained Series. An Introduction to
Orfeo ed Euridice written
by Thomson Smillie; narrated by David
Timson 
NAXOS Opera Explained 8.558122
[66.17]
