Interesting night at the opera.
I am really excited to share this opera with Chaltin because it is one of my favorites from the Portland Opera. This night however is damned from the beginning.
The giant metal staircase didn’t attach properly and shook violently. It was not used, and eventually pulled back up into the mets enormous caverns. Then we heard a commotion in the orchestra seating followed by a person being escorted out. Finally, during one of the most important arias, the opera stopped completely with the two stars left on a rocky staircase. A man came onto stage and said ‘one of the performers was in distress.’ The opera eventually resumed, but we’ve never experienced so many anomalous interruptions at the Met before.
We saw Mark Morris’s troupe of dancer perform The Hard Nut at BAM Theater and absolutely fell in love with their creativity and risks. I like the idea of the Met bringing in local performers, but for me their choreography here didn’t work.
This night was way too inconsistent to fairly judge, I’ll leave that to the chorus from Hell who were all dressed as terrible people from the past. A highlight of a troubled evening was the chorus. They chose the particular villain from history they wanted to costume as, and you could feel the fun in their voices.
I love Jamie Barton’s voice tonight also and look forward to seeing her again. She was a powerhouse during The Ring Cycle.
So what is Orfeo de Euridice all about? It begins with mourners who gather round the grave of Euridice who has just died from a snake bite. Her boyfriend Orfeo sings with such genuine grief that Amore gives him the chance to go into hades and bring her back, but with two conditions. He cannot look at her or she will die for good, and he cannot tell her why he won’t look at her. Orfeo is up for the challenge and proceeds to calm the beasts and furies with his music to rescue Eurdidice. Will he bring her back from the dead? Who knows, different productions have different endings.
Notes on the production
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Composer…………………….…….. Christoph Willibald Gluck
Orfeo………………………..…….…… Jamie Barton
Euridice………………………….…… Hei-Kyung Hong
Amore…………………………..…….. Hera Hyesang Park
Conductor…………………………… Mark Wigglesworth
Metropolitan Opera
11/1/19