Much to our surprise, the 2022-2023 Teatro Real opening season has taken place not in its majestic stage, but in the modern, alternative one of the Teatros del Canal, which usually stages some operas of the Teatro Real season , but not certainly the opening title. To start the current season, the company has chosen Philip Glass' Orphée, a chamber opera sung in French, putting music to Jean Cocteau's script for his own 1950 film.
Philip Glass is one of the most celebrated contemporary composers. With an extense catalogue comprising movie soundtracks, operas, experimental works, symphonies, piano sonatas... Glass is at the same time one of the few contemporary living composers with massive audience, reaching many young, modern-art-loving audiences.
It is curious how the minimalist music, born with a revolutionary, experimental purpose, is saving the modern symphony, and operatic repertoire, since the works by Glass himself, Adams, Pärt or Nyman are easier, accessible, and more beautiful to conservative ears than atonalistic works. Pärt seems more enjoyable to massive, traditionalistic ears than Schoenberg.
Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphée re-imagines the myth, portraying the mythical Orpheus as irascible, obsessed with success, promiscuous, who makes suffer his wife, and the mythical background set now in the 1950s Paris, in a work in which the borders of the living world and underworld are not very precise. According to the chauffeur Heurtebise, it is set by the mirrors.
Rafael R. Villalobos is one of the most promising directors in operatic stages. He produced an interesting Così in Seville, and also his polemic Brussels and coming-soon in Barcelona staging for Tosca has made the scheduled tenor Roberto Alagna and his wife Aleksandra Kurzak to leave the project. In this occasion, Villalobos sets the action in the 1990s America, where neo-liberalism was at its height and the television was it most powerful tool. The only set, in a mostly empty stage, is a structure with several television screens in which we can see advertisements and different programs from American TV in those times. This structure changes of position as the drama goes by. The rest is an empty stage, leaving the setting to the acting direction and lightning, which makes a beautiful Act 3. In this vision, as minimalist as the music, the borders between dreams and reality are even less clearer than in the original script.
Glass conceived his Orphée as a chamber opera, sung in French as it sets music to Cocteau's script, which becomes the libretto. This has several inspired moments as the interludes, the first Heurtebise scene, with a beautiful basic sequence, or Act 3, in which the music suggests the dark underworld very interestingly.
Jordi Francés conducts the Teatro Real Orchestra, now reduced to 31 musicians, but still surpassing the original ensemble imagined by Glass. Francés conducts the orchestra, getting more and more inspiration, to make a beautiful Act 3. Percussion, brass and woodwind sections did bright in the performance and the general level was very good, despite some tutti which in the upper zones was perceived as diffusing.
The cast for this opera was a mostly Spanish, and all of them were truly devoted.
Edward Nelson, with a nice voice and in a physical fit shape, sang a tormented, tempered Orphée. Mikeldi Atxalandabaso, the leading Spanish spieltenor, really was the best singer in the cast, with his beautiful, brilliant-toned voice, as the mysterious Heurtebise. María Rey-Joly was a splendid, well sung Princess, and Sylvia Schwartz performed a tormented, also well sung Eurydice. Pablo García-López had a difficult task as Cégeste, a role which alternates singing with sprechgesang, but he undertook it with his youthful voice. From the rest of supporting roles, we could mention Karina Demurova as Aglaonice, a powerful mezzo-soprano here depicted as a strong amazone, and David Sánchez as the Judge, with a great dark bass voice who was heard all over the hall.
Several young people was seen in a highly occupated hall, and welcomed warmly the work, with ovations to the protagonists. The youthful ambiance was suggested by the many woos heard to applaud singers, instead of the traditional bravos. An unusual season opening, which despite all is not the official one, which will take place next month with Aida, now at the Teatro Real stage. But, why not, if this is an opera about an universal myth, with libretto by a renowned writer and music by a world-famed composer?
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