He presented Handel’s Orlando as a fireman and put Gluck’s Iphigenie in a suicide vest. So it is no surprise that director Pierre Audi writes of his latest Gluck production that he wanted to reimagine it for our time.
His is a very 21st century concept, a love triangle in which Love herself is sovereign. If Orphée cannot look upon Euridice as he leads he out of Hades, it is because he only has eyes for another, the seductive figure of Love. Euridice is his wife, but Love his mistress.
Around them, the shadowy Furies twist like the mental torments of an unfaithful husband, and far from achieving a happy ending, Orphée is eventually left alone on stage, abandoned by both women, a re-interpretation that I found entirely persuasive.
Pared down to this psychological viewpoint, the ascetic design by Jean Kalman (set) and Haider Ackermann (costume) presents the three principals all in white, Love and Euridice almost interchangeable, the former in a gown, the latter in more homely trousers, the spirits in black, half-hidden in the subconscious by a dark curtain.
Conductor Daniele Gatti chooses the composer’s 1774 Paris reworking of the opera, which seems to me less successful than the shorter, more familiar original written for Vienna 12 years earlier. Gluck added some passages, but most crucially, to fit in with French fashion, changed the role of Orphée from contralto to tenor and inserted longer ballet music.
Marie Antoinette clearly approved—awarding him a pension of 6,000 Francs and a similar amount for any new work he produced on the French stage. To a modern audience, however, the ten-minute sequence of the dances of the Furies and Blessed Spirits that forms the centrepiece of the opera may seem too long a spell in purgatory.
I miss the throatier sound of a contralto in the role of Orphée, especially in the familiar aria about losing his Euridice, but Juan Francisco Gatell acts the part of the insecure, egocentric Orphee well, and sings the closing number of act 1, which Gluck added for the 1774 version, with sensitivity, as if the long, testing lines are needed to summon up his courage to entice the underworld.
With barely seven minutes of solo or recitative, Anna Pohaska nevertheless makes a moving impression as the slighted Euridice, but dominant over all is Sara Blanch as L’Amour, entering upon the field of mortals with the hauteur of a model slinking down the catwalk. Love truly conquers all.