Some of the acrobatics on stage were very impressive, and I liked the portrayal of a doppelgänger concept in having two Orpheuses at times, but a lot of the staging seemed banal: it seemed incongruous for Orpheus to get a drink from the water-dispenser in the midst of the action, and I really did not get why he was only half-dressed a lot of the time. Birtwistle’s scoring makes good use of the unusual instrumentation (lots of percussion, but no bowed strings), and did a remarkable job of portraying tension, strain, and even extremity *without* significant recourse to extended techniques. In general, the orchestra was outstanding, if a little too peripheral in the first act. Despite this, when the curtain came down eventually at the end of that act, it felt too soon, since the narrative had only just picked up some momentum.Īs for the third act, the gradual musical apotheosis was magical, but the action on stage seemed to outstay its welcome, despite some powerful moments (such as when the lighting turned everything red) and some well judged recapitulation in the choreography (there was one chase across the stage which referenced the first act compellingly, although I was still not entirely clear as to its function). However, the first act was badly paced, with the banality of the staging becoming too protracted. There was a real sense of drive and urgency in the orchestral music (although I was not entirely convinced by the off-stage mouthpiece sounds), and some moments of the staging were electrifying, such as the point where Orpheus looked behind him, and the entombment of Euridice. I was at the opening night (near the front of Balcony, near the centre), and, contrary to Nice, think the second act to have been the strongest. (Daniel) Kramer takes the sound and fury to signify whatever you want them to, and while the outlines of a real face sometimes emerge in the score – the smokiness of a rare saxophone solo in amongst the wind, brass and percussion, the ghost of a real dance, the desolate calm after the storm – they’re not to be found onstage. Peter Zinovieff’s text is loose, but not lazy. …the big botch is the crucial second act, where Orpheus faces the 17 arches of Hades and is supposed to lose Eurydice again and again. Rather than austere, penetrating ritual, all we get is camp and bling, combined with an apparent insistence on adding comedy to the action, so that the judges of the dead and the furies become a troupe of vaudeville caricatures. Instead, Kramer simply adds business of his own, cluttering the stage with irrelevancies. It’s a gaudy display, which does nothing to tease out the complexities of a work that presents the Orpheus story as a bundle of contradictory myths where events are repeated and linear time abandoned, and in which the three main protagonists, Orpheus, Euridice and Aristaeus, are each represented on stage by two singers and a mime, representing the person, the myth and the hero. For this is a wilful parade of self-indulgence, with set designs by Lizzie Clachan translating the action to a sleek modern apartment, and costumes by Daniel Lismore that might be more appropriate in a Rio carnival procession or on the Mexican Day of the Dead. The production is the work of ENO’s departing artistic director Daniel Kramer, and let’s hope it is the last of his shows to be seen there. The Guardian’s headline is ‘travesty of a production is nothing to laugh about.’ Andrew Clements writes: Rupert Christiansen begins: ‘Over three hours long, often fiercely cacophonous, with a preposterously arcane text lacking any narrative coherence, The Mask of Orpheus makes no effort to be loved….’ The Telegraph signals that ‘for the average audience, this is a physical and mental ordeal’. The first reviews of English National Opera’s revival of Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus are discouraging.
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