2023-05-26 23:56:00
At the Wiener Festwochen 2014, Romeo Castellucci led the audience in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” via camera and video installation to the sickbed of a real “Euridice” – to that of 25-year-old Karin Anna G. in the Lainz geriatric center, trapped in the realm of shadows a coma.
In the last Gluck “Orfeo” in Salzburg in the summer of 2014, director Ivan Alexandre added a dancer as Death – not as a frightening figure, but as Euridice’s tender lover.
For the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, which this year is dedicated entirely to the Orpheus myth and thus to the “Passions de l’âme”, i.e. the passions of the soul, Christoph Loy also chose additions, but structural ones. Together with the conductor Gianluca Capuano, he took the Parma version of Gluck’s opera, added seven scenes to the act with elements from the original Vienna version and the Paris version, added the dance of furies and began straight away with the lamentation instead of the happy overture The happy end of the opera, which premiered in Vienna in 1762, did not materialize.
Like the two other productions mentioned, the German director not only shows a tragic love story from ancient mythology, but also asks himself and us existential questions. Beforehand, the 60-year-old emphasized that for him this drama was “actually also the drama of each individual: we have to decide every day what we do with our lives”.
His conventional staging on Johannes Leiacker’s dry stage with gate and entrance hall like in an old-rich villa and stairs (oh yes, underworld!) does not allow this conceptual premise with standing parts and ramp singing to become very clear. The little opera has its gaps and pitfalls, and if the choreographer Loy hadn’t helped the director Loy, even just over an hour and a half would have been very long. However, what the twelve dancers deliver in terms of feverish chaos and calm tableaus is impressive and moving, especially in the mourning scenes at the beginning and end, danses macabres of allegorical depth.
But of course the story of Orpheus and Eurydice themselves and in Gluck’s “Azione teatrale per musica” especially the figure of Orfeo, on which the work mainly focuses, are moving. One more parade role for the festival director. “The most unbearable misfortune for the soul is to be deprived of the only loved one,” sings Cecilia Bartoli, among other things. And she does it in the breeches role (costumes: Ursula Renzenbrink) with inimitable intensity, both in terms of singing and acting.
The Roman mezzo-soprano, 57 years young in a week, shines with intimacy and richness of colour. The sweetness of what has been and the bitterness of what is lost mix in her man of sorrows, Orfeo, to form the psychogram of a lost person. When he turns around towards Euridice on the way out of Hades, heart and world stand still.
The young French soprano Melissa Petit sings the small part of Euridice with finesse, while the New Zealander Madison Nonoa plays Cupid with style. Great events come out of the ditch: Bartoli’s house orchestra in Monaco, Les Musiciens du Prince, and Gianluca Capuano spread fury and passion with a delicate and highly differentiated sound, and the present chamber choir Il Canto di Orfeo fits in perfectly.
The final chord of the intense evening was pleasing and disconcerting at the same time: Secretary of State for Culture Andrea Mayer (Green Party) awarded Cecilia Bartoli the title of Austrian Chamber Singer, almost in the final applause on stage. Nice gesture, not nice timing.
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#Cheers #Glucks #Orfeo #Whitsun #Festival