Gluck's famous opera with acrobats? It's surprisingly bloodless

Telegraph

7 hours ago

A female aerial artist wearing a striking red dress tumbles down from the ceiling on a rope, symbolising the descent of the ill-fated Eurydice into the underworld. This is how Yaron Lifschitz's modern staging of Gluck's popular 1762 opera Orpheus and Eurydice begins. The show's concept, combining opera with circus, is an intriguing one, but this production from Opera Queensland – with acrobats from the Brisbane-based Circa company – feels misconceived and oddly clinical.
The subterranean afterlife into which Eurydice has fallen – having been killed by a snakebite – is visualised by Lifschitz (who also designs) as a place of almost antiseptic, white minimalism. When we meet her bereft lover Orpheus – who follows her into the underworld in an attempt to persuade Hades, king of the dead, to restore his beloved to life – he is seemingly in an asylum, resting on a white table-cum-bed. It looks like something Jasper Conran might have designed for a rehab centre for Hollywood A-listers.
As the fine British countertenor Iestyn Davies (playing Orpheus in a white shirt and black business suit) begins to sing of his anguish, his words appear and evaporate in smoke on the wall behind him. It isn't long before Eurydice (sung beautifully by Australian/British soprano Samantha Clarke) is appearing inside a small greenhouse (which, one assumes, is supposed to be a symbol of confinement).
As the opera unfolds, Gluck's splendid late-Baroque score and Ranieri de' Calzabigi's libretto are accompanied by a small army of gymnastic artists from Brisbane company Circa. When the chorus of Scottish Opera arrive they are clad in black boiler suits.
The difficulty with all of this – from the circus performance to the modish graphics and consciously fashionable design – is that it fails to make the necessary emotional connection either with Gluck's opera or the ancient myth upon which it is based. The greenhouse, in particular, reminds one of the period in the 1990s and early-2000s when every other trendy live art show – usually by students or graduates of Dartington College of Arts – seemed to feature a small glasshouse.
The great frustration of the production, which premiered in Brisbane in 2019, is that the tremendous capacities of the performers – from the lead singers, the chorus and the excellent Scottish Chamber Orchestra (under the baton of Laurence Cummings) to the circus artists – are never in doubt. However, as Circa's performers slide on silks in mid-air or turn themselves into a human staircase for Orpheus to climb, the music seems almost to be at the service of the circus work, much as Ravel's Bolero served the British ice skaters Torvill and Dean in the 1980s.
When, at the end, Davies's Orpheus writes the words 'The triumph of love' in blood on the wall, it seems like a moment of self-parody, so anodyne and bloodless is Lifschitz's production.
Truth to tell, the piece was cheered to the rafters by sections of the audience. Had we been in Vienna in 1913 (the year of Schoenberg's famous 'scandal concert'), I suspect booing might have ensued from those who were unimpressed.
Alas, Edinburgh International Festival audiences are not given to such expressions of discontent.
Until Aug 16; eif.co.uk