ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE (Opera Comique/OperaVision)***

 

By Emma

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM_hYz1vFPU

Available until: 4^th December 2020

Orpheus and Eurydice is a really beautiful love story and loads of composers have written operas about it. One of the first operas ever was Orfeo by Monteverdi. A composer called Philip Glass did an opera called Orphee this century. There have been others too including an operetta but they’re probably not as good as this one because it’s perfect. I couldn’t get into the Monteverdi one because the music was quite weird and I don’t really understand Philip Glass and I couldn’t imagine doing an operetta of such a sad story.

This one only has three solo singing characters so there is more of a focus on Orpheus and Eurydice and you don’t have to try to work out who everyone else is. There are other people involved in this story. Eurydice doesn’t go down to the Underworld on her own and Orpheus probably isn’t just allowed to walk in and rescue her but Gluck strips it right down to what matters.

I think there’s some CGI in this. There’s a really cute little cloud thing that seems to be controlling Eurydice at the start and then she just sinks down into the stage. That can look really funny but the music is really serious and beautiful so it didn’t. I think there were some invisible ropes too because the chorus looked like they were flying. Aurelien Bory and Pierre Dequivre made the set look really black and shadowy. That was probably partly the lighting designer Arno Veyrat too.

Orpheus is sung by a woman and she looks like a woman (it doesn’t say who did the make-up design, I think they should say that really) but I don’t think that matters if Orpheus looks like a woman. I don’t need to tell myself she’s a man and just accept it because why shouldn’t Eurydice be married to a woman? And Orpheus can use whatever pronouns he/she/they likes and whatever sex they look like  there’s nothing wrong with that. Orpheus is just a person in love who wants to get their partner out of a bad situation. A lot of people can relate to that in different ways. There’s definitely been times when I’ve wanted to drag my partner out of his toxic workplace and get him a different job.

Marianne Crebassa sang Orpheus and she has a really good voice. She makes Orpheus seem really tough. Orpheus’ big aria was gorgeous and so sad.

Helene Gullmette was Eurydice. She looked quite a lot like Orpheus but you can tell them apart. She showed how scared and upset and confused Eurydice is. She is a really powerful and passionate singer. She’s hardly in it really but she makes a big impression when she does start singing.

Amor is the other character in the opera. I think she’s a sort of narrator. She looks more like a hamster than anything. I’m not commenting on her weight, I don’t comment on other women’s weight and anyway she has a great figure. I just mean she has a wheel which the dancers spin round for her. It doesn’t look like much fun really. I would feel sick if they did that to me and I wouldn’t want to feel sick if I was wearing a nice dress like that.

The Pygmalion Orchestra was really good and there was a really nice flute solo. Raphael Pichon was the conductor. He lets the orchestra really take their time, he’s not rushing to the next part of the story.

I was a little bit disappointed with the famous song. It’s one of the saddest songs ever but this time there was something a bit too bouncy about it. But it still sounded good.