Gratuitous Musickal Posting (TM)

I had been cringing at the news of a new production of Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo (one of my great favorites) to mark the 400th anniversary of its debute because I'd been reading of all the gimmicks, stunts and outright mockeries that were going to be used in its performance.

Well, I'm happy to report that I've nothing to fear. The thing has been soundly trashed. Here's the Guardian's take:

Christopher Alden's travesty of opera's first masterpiece this week reaches Newcastle. It was booed in Leeds, and again in Nottingham, not the ideal celebration of its 400th birthday. Christopher Moulds's conducting might have saved the day, but that, too, turned out to be leaden-footed. The sooner this dire, so pleased-with-itself production is consigned to the graveyard of failed attempts to enliven elderly masterworks, the better.

Notorious for his radical updates, Alden dragged Tosca towards our own times for Opera North in some style. Why he chose to set Monteverdi's spellbinder in a drug-ridden 1980s nightclub peopled by mincing grotesques never becomes apparent. Sticky tape is the star of the show, used to bind Orpheus and Eurydice into marriage, and to crucify the latter to the wall of Hades.

Only that fine actor-singer Paul Nilon emerges from this fiasco with his reputation intact. Those contemplating the purchase of tickets should pause to reflect on the inscription defied by Nilon's Orpheus as he braves Cerberus to enter the underworld: 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here.'

And here's the UK Times:

I doubt, however, whether it will be clobbered by a production weirder than this obscure and joyless Christopher Alden farrago for Opera North.

He turns the classical legend into what seems to be a particularly nasty game of charades at a druggy fancy-dress party for dissolute rich kids (Etonians, perhaps?) in about 1980. Mind you, Paul Steinberg’s set — a vast, oppressive, doorless chamber into which people scramble through high windows — evokes something menacing in the mental-institution line; while a bizarre ritual in which the cast slap red petals on their foreheads and do a strange routine with their fingers suggests that we have intruded into a brainwashed cult. Either way, you will gather that not much of the original plot remains.

Euridice (the clear-voiced Anna Stephany, looking suitably bewildered) doesn’t die; she is forcibly pinned to a wall with insulation tape.

The same tape trusses her to an equally terrified Orfeo at their “wedding”.

Orfeo himself (Paul Nilon, singing and acting with heroic commitment, considering the circumstances) is taunted, blindfolded, encaged by piled-up furniture and portrayed as a performing freak who long ago crossed the threshold into madness. A haunting final image, in which the anguished Nilon continues to drum rhythms on his armchair after the opera has ended, suggests that the whole spectacle may be a figment of a mind unhinged from reality.

That is an intriguing idea. Another is to have his magnificently florid solos — ultimate showcases for the art of singing, circa 1607 — recorded on stage with a handheld microphone by a creepy fan who turns out to be his dad, Apollo (touchingly played by Ashley Catling). At the end Apollo comforts his agitated son by pointing to the tapes as a guarantee of Orfeo’s “immortality”.

But two neat directorial wheezes don’t redeem an evening that turns what should be one of the most vibrant of Renaissance spectacles into yet another trite depiction of modern-day ennui. It’s as if Alden and Opera North had no faith in Monteverdi’s lyric genius and their own singers to convey a timeless myth without crassly forcing it into a context that doesn’t fit.

And the Telegraph really puts in the boot:

In his new production for Opera North, Christopher Alden sets the Prologue in a cross between a weirdos' fancy-dress party and a lunatic asylum (ah, yes, he has "universalised" the story). Music - Amy Freston, in clarion voice - cuts a Kylie-esque figure in purple plumage, mocking the words she sings, while the Chorus sneers at any hint of noble sentiment, and the union of Orpheus and Euridice is sealed with parcel tape (so all is not well in Arcadia...).

All this is standard-issue self-indulgence, with a sprinkling of old-fashioned épater les bourgeois. But not content with spitting in the soup, Alden has to vomit over the main course. When the Messenger's news and Orpheus's stricken response to it pass without a flicker of emotion, it is clear that he is clueless about the work entrusted to his care. Even Orpheus, whose suffering Alden finds it harder to mess with, is made to sing "Possente spirto" to a music-stand, as a send-up of operatic floridity.

As the radio announcer says in the Dead Bishop on the Landing Sketch, "Well, we seem to have a consensus there."

Nice to see that the naughty of this world sometimes do get punished.