Gluck’s down-to-basics reformist opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, is a very human and sublimely musical rite that explores humanity’s most fundamental and blunt existential condition: we die. Or, more painfully for us, those we love deeply die before we do, and we must then live our lonely grief, sometimes craving our own death to ease unbearable pain. Life with death as an unpredictable and inevitable end is impossible to live and somehow we must finally address our fear and pain.
No wonder this myth of a man, Orfeo, who would go even to hell to once again have the recently dead wife he loves is a cornerstone narrative of our culture. And for eight performances, the Canadian Opera Company provides potent means for us to consider such immediate human matters through their current production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, one which is deeply haunting and exquisitely produced on all counts.
At the outset, the paired down orchestra allows individual instrumental voices to suggest isolation and almost immediately we sense solitary existence. The first image we encounter, as the curtain rises slowly, is an isolated male figure, back to us, and an upstage procession right to left silhouette, against brilliant sunset lighting on the horizon, and across the wide expanse of a stage. The setting is an actual burial, we realize, into this wide expanse of gravel-like surface. These seemingly infinite dimensions wherever we look suggest –dare I say subconsciously?- the crushing of the delicate human heart into insignificance. Director Robert Carsen’s brilliant production compactly speaks fears we do not want to know we feel.
The existential continuum that here gives presence to the human condition is the plaintive and heartbreaking countertenor of Lawrence Zazzo. It’s a voice that in essence seems eternally wounded in the presence a darkness that gives no answers and only begrudging light. It’s a voice of inner resonance, inner echo, and accumulating effect. To hear this voice as Orfeo is to witness deep human sorrow. Meanwhile, the deeply resonant and full-bodied chorus of black silhouettes makes, in Peter Van Praet’s intensely unforgiving lighting, elongated shadows across the stage upon which Orfeo walks in despair.
Gluck wanted human emotion and not theatrical artifice to prevail in his masterwork and, under Harry Bicket’s baton, passages that pinpoint and echo the turmoil of human feeling are negotiated with impressively light agility. Again the production’s emphasis on iconographic image-making is superbly unsettling as the dark stone-like shapes across the stage gradually reveal themselves as human forms condemned inescapably, one feels, to the lowest place, the lowest existence. In this Hades, figures creep and crawl but move not very far; they seem at one with the dark and dead horizontal surface on which they almost exist.
When the chorus rises to stand, it’s again into a choreography of motion that is visual poetry, the kind of which Carsen is a master. The robes they discarded lie about like human remains, among which Zazzo’s hunched and desperately jerking figure of Orfeo weaves. When Orfeo and Euridice rise through the grave, it is the fresh and beautiful clarity of Isabel Bayrakdarian’s soprano that brings assertive human passion to the tale. The shining ring to her voice, one that suggests the vitality of life, provides dramatic tension in sound with Zazzo’s lush, velvety and more introspective tone, as did the piercing delicacy in the voice of Ambur Braid as Amore. We hear dramatic tension through the tonal quality of voices in this production.
It is not only love, but magical theatrical beauty, that conquers all in this gem of an offering, one which originated with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. We have here an always wished for consummate blend of orchestra, voices, direction, setting, and lighting that revitalizes and makes boldly new the turf of familiar material. One thus feels indeed privileged to experience the Canadian Opera Company’s intensely beautiful Orfeo.
This thrillingly mounted ritual we have encountered as opera has entered our lives, entered the part of us where we cannot escape the fundamental issues of our lives. Through imaginatively conceived and brilliantly realized theatrical means, we have been given a dimension of beauty that, at very least, speaks back somehow to the death that awaits each of us. Without doubt, this is a production one will never forget.