In total contrast is Robert Wilson's 1999 production of Gluck's Orphee et Euridice. Here we are not given surreal dream images but slow-motion abstraction, and a visual screen-picture that is entirely, endlessly, and finally boringly, blue. The three female lead soloists are excellent in themselves, especially Magdalena Kozena as Orphee. The conductor, John Eliot Gardiner again, provides a vivid sound picture, using the revised version made by Berlioz. But there's no Romantic-era dynamism here. Instead, the characters deliver their arias almost without moving, in the style of Japanese Noh drama. The chorus is treated in similar fashion, and the set consists of little more than a miniature ice-berg — wholly appropriate for what is essentially a frigid production.
This is precisely how up-dated opera shouldn't be done. Like Rusalka, it aims for a dream-like effect. But whereas the abstract may hypnotize (literally, put to sleep), most people's dreams are full of detail, however incongruous. I will never watch this DVD again, but I expect I'll watch the ENO Rusalka many more times.
Lastly, another film about Maria Callas. The problem with old stories is that they don't always bear the retelling. Most people who are interested in Callas will already know everything this film, made by Tony Palmer in 1987, 10 years after her death, tells them. But for those who don't know it, this is certainly an informative account, with some profound insights, and even more telling personal memories, coming from the likes of opera director Franco Zeffirelli. If you can bear to hear the Callas story again, watching this DVD would be an excellent way to hear it one more time.
Even so, the time lag tells. All the fur coats, expensive clothes and press adulation go to show how lucky we are that opera singers aren't like this any more. Now out of the fashionable limelight, opera at last has to survive on its own merits.
RSS