Rating: 
Summary: 5 estrellas a la música, 1 estrella a la escena.
Review: Nos encontramos ante una gran version musicalmente hablando de la ópera de Gluck. SIR JONH ELIOT GARDINER conoce a la perfeccion este repertorio y es difÃcil que alguien pueda hacerlo mejor que él. Su lectura al frente de los magnÃficos ENGLISH BARROQUE SOLIST es más acertada que en el disco que años atrás protagonizó Lee Ragin. Además, aquà se oferta la completa version de ParÃs.
MAGDALENA KOZÉNA es un Orfeo contralto de voz doliente, segura en toda la tesitura y sin problemas en las coloraturas. PATRICIA PETIBDefON cumple notablemente como Amour, y MADALENE BENDER cumple sin más en Eurydice. El MONTEVERDI CHOIR supera con nota su largo y complicado cometido.
Y aquà se acaba todo lo feliz de este dvd: La puesta en escena de Robert Wilson, desnuda, vacÃa y oscura es un fiasco. La dirección de actores, que deambulan por el escenario como si se tratara de estatuas acaba por cansar.
Definitivamente, este es un dvd para disfrutar de una leccion de canto y de una puesta en escena francamente aburrida.
Rating:
Summary: 5 estrellas a la música, 1 estrella a la escena.
Review: Nos encontramos ante una gran version musicalmente hablando de la ópera de Gluck. SIR JONH ELIOT GARDINER conoce a la perfeccion este repertorio y es difícil que alguien pueda hacerlo mejor que él. Su lectura al frente de los magníficos ENGLISH BARROQUE SOLIST es más acertada que en el disco que años atrás protagonizó Lee Ragin. Además, aquí se oferta la completa version de París.
MAGDALENA KOZÉNA es un Orfeo contralto de voz doliente, segura en toda la tesitura y sin problemas en las coloraturas. PATRICIA PETIBDefON cumple notablemente como Amour, y MADALENE BENDER cumple sin más en Eurydice. El MONTEVERDI CHOIR supera con nota su largo y complicado cometido.
Y aquí se acaba todo lo feliz de este dvd: La puesta en escena de Robert Wilson, desnuda, vacía y oscura es un fiasco. La dirección de actores, que deambulan por el escenario como si se tratara de estatuas acaba por cansar.
Definitivamente, este es un dvd para disfrutar de una leccion de canto y de una puesta en escena francamente aburrida.
Rating: 
Summary: Less is more
Review: This minimal version of Gluck's opera is not bad....not bad at all. [Gluck himself was trying to strip down the complexities of the usual opera affair in his own time so Wilson has some authority here]The music is beautiful to my ears but I am no musician. Fortunately opera isn't just music. it's theatre. I come from the design side of theatre and so I shall comment on the look of this production. Wilson is very clever with his "less is more" approach. As a friend of mine noted, this stripped down production makes you listen to the music. Yet there is great beauty in Wilson's stage picture. And one of the best stage devices I've ever seen. Throughout the work's 1st act there is this shape, 1st seen as a rock upon which Orpheus stands in a pose of outstretched arms as he mourns the loss of his beloved. This image is repeated and often shown in silhouette with strong backlighting. When Orpheus descends into Hades he takes his familiar position on the rock, backlit. He and the distinctive shape of the rock are a positive black image on the white scrim. Then a black drop comes down with the rock shape in reverse cut out of it. Orpheus moves into this now negative white shape on black, now the entrance to Hades, and strikes his familiar pose. WOW! It is so simple and so effective you must see it! Also the shocking flying in of a perspective Baroque set with 18th century [well, almost] costumed singers for the final chorus....and that cryptic floating cube Wilson likes so much....is a wonderful device. If only Orpheus had some masculine features on his costume, it being in this instance a pants role. Just making it knee length would have worked. And the Elysian Fields were lit as cold and blue as the rest of Hades. Could we have some golden light at least? Still, an interesting production that mostly works and is worthwhile. Wilson's "Alceste" is in the same vein but even more refined and perfected.
Rating:
Summary: You'll be stunned or you'll hate it, no middle terms
Review: This production of Gluck's Paris version of this milestone in the genre's history (1774, but in Berlioz's edition of almost a century later), taped live at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris some five years ago, is a good example of today's opera world. Singers are handsome and young, so much so that they could easily pass for fashion models, and their voices are light and agile . The production, although devised by Texan Robert Wilson, is typical of the other side of the Atlantic, one that perhaps if it crossed the ocean to the US would be rather frowned upon by the more traditional audiences one is likely to find over there and banalised as "eurotrashy". Wilson takes to have his singers (soloists of choir) to move statue-like and in poses that recall frescoes from the Micenian period of ancient Greece, sometimes even walking backwards, which may not be everybody's cup of tea; Frida Parmeggiani's wardrobe won't help much either, sometimes you may think she mistook Calzabaggi's idealised ancient Greece for Schikaneder's idea of ancient Egypt as some of the clothing, especially that worn by the choir, seems taken out from a performance of "The Magic Flute". So whether you'll visually like or dislike this performance will greatly depend on your openness to this kind of innovating staging propositions. I myself enjoyed throughout although I'd admit the statue-like poses and turns, especially on the part of Kozena's, could become tiresome after repeated viewing.
The trio of female principals is outstanding. Kozena's career has skyrocketed since her irruption in the opera scene in the middle of last decade. Her youth apart, she is too beautiful a woman to assume a credible impersonation of a male character (remember, Gluck wrote the Orfeo part for a male castrato voice, and since the demise of that barbaric practice it has been variously been taken up by both male and female singers, countertenors or mezzosopranos and contraltos); her make-up and costume don't help either, as she's dressed in a (female?) gown and strikingly made-up. But she sings so good, she projects herself so well from the stage (and if you'been to the Chatelet you'll know it's no small place) and manages her coloraturas and fiorituras so splendidly that you adjust promptly (one has but to remember in turn how in past decades those huge singers with thicker voices who tackled the part had quite a hard time to master them!). Young Patricia Petibon is a darling of french audiences, an emerging singer when the performance was staged but an established one in her own right nowadays, presenting an enchanting Amour; Mahnattan School of Music graduate Madeline Bender is gorgeus to look at and takes full advantage of how the lyrical character of Euridice's part does suit her voice.
A chapter apart deserve Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his outstanding Orchestre Revolutionaire & Romantique. They project Gluck's score with a vitality and energy that push it forward in time to Mozartian characteristics (and mind that Gluck was some 40 years Mozart's senior), in sharp opposition to a way of playing this music that is all too common and which renders it almost bland. In Sir John's hands, we face a vigour, a vehemence and brilliance that evidence themselves from the Overture's very first notes and which won't give in until the last note, some one and a half hours later.
So, what you have here is a remarkable rendition of this opera. Whether you love or hate it will greatly depend on your attitude towards today's importance given to stage directors, exagerated and irrelevant in the opinion of many, a brilliant turn of events in the eyes of others, but a fact you have to live with. I'd give the dvd 5 stars outright but settled on 4 on account of this, as the appeal of the presentation will not be universal. Sound and image are very good but, as is common with Image Entertainment's US repackagings, there is no additional material.
Rating:
Summary: Too, Too French
Review: Will you agree that playing Orpheus with a woman is pretty daring? Now imagine the hero as not simply female, but defiantly feminine. Add the sparest possible set, costumes, and movement, and already you have the most icily abstract interpretation possible. So put it on ultra-revealing DVD, shot up close where every adam's apple glitch, every makeup hitch, every dropped stitch comes glaringly into view, and you have a bizarrerie of Gluck's masterpiece, with what started out as a paean to love now more resembling a discourse on linguistic analysis or Leibnizian metaphysics. The saving grace, if any there be, is Gluck's transcendent music, emerging somehow through the director's valiant campaign to stamp it out. But then it's the only Orfeo available on DVD to date. If that fact is enough for you, as it was for me, then do as I did: buy it, play it, and hope the next production (in five or ten years?) has more blood and warmth. You can be sure it will; having less would be impossible.
Rating:
Summary: Too, Too French
Review: Will you agree that playing Orpheus with a woman is pretty daring? Now imagine the hero as not simply female, but defiantly feminine. Add the sparest possible set, costumes, and movement, and already you have the most icily abstract interpretation possible. So put it on ultra-revealing DVD, shot up close where every adam's apple glitch, every makeup hitch, every dropped stitch comes glaringly into view, and you have a bizarrerie of Gluck's masterpiece, with what started out as a paean to love now more resembling a discourse on linguistic analysis or Leibnizian metaphysics. The saving grace, if any there be, is Gluck's transcendent music, emerging somehow through the director's valiant campaign to stamp it out. But then it's the only Orfeo available on DVD to date. If that fact is enough for you, as it was for me, then do as I did: buy it, play it, and hope the next production (in five or ten years?) has more blood and warmth. You can be sure it will; having less would be impossible.
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