Gluck

Once you listen to this account, it's easily understandable just why Orfeo ed Euridice has become the most famous opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck. Based on the well-known story from antiquity, Gluck composed a varied, engrossing music full of melodious arias, stirring dances, and dramatic duets and choruses. Conductor René Jacobs has decided here to eschew countertenor casting, with the result that we can enjoy mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink as Orfeo. She interprets the part of the lovesick hero with vocal precision, stylistic assurance and admirably clear articulation. Her voice radiates warmth and resonates beautifully but at the same time with strength–especially in the highly dramatic Act III, which she, together with Veronica Cangemi (Euridice), shapes with an almost stormy emotional fervour. Maria Christina Kiehr sings with angelic beauty as Amore, while Jacobs leads the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the Rias Chamber Choir with verve and sweep in a recording that conveys limber beauty under the aegis of the historically-informed practice movement.

This is the masterwork, Gluck's last important opera, which convinced the teenage medical student Berlioz, when he first heard it in 1821, that he had to be a composer. He worshipped Gluck and took his side in the phoney "Gluck vs.Piccini War". He set himself the task of sitting in the Conservatoire library to copy out the entire score in order to absorb its lessons. Its directness and drama influenced his artistic style his whole life through, as evinced by key points in "Les Troyens".

Two late and baleful tragedies by Euripides focus on the ill-starred daughter of the Greek King, Agamemnon. Will he sacrifice Iphigenia in order to secure fair winds for his voyage to Troy? In Aulis, the drama rages until she is spared. Having escaped to Tauris, Iphigenia finds herself compelled to kill her own brother before, once more, the fickle gods intervene.

Thus spake Shaw, writing about Gluck towards the end of the 19th century. Shaw went on to allege that the musical culture of his time had not fully caught up with this great master and reformer of opera, and the very thoughtful and instructive essay that Gardiner contributes here suggests to me that there may still, in the third millennium, be a little catching up to do. Whatever one thinks of Gluck, either as a composer or as a musical dramatist or as an operatic rationalist and reformer, it seems to me that he was very clear-headed in one basic respect - he knew the difference between musical drama and musical tableau. Classical drama has an inherent tendency towards tableau, with its statues, white-robed women, prophets, deities and heroes…

Orfeo ed Euridice (French version: Orphée et Eurydice; English translation: Orpheus and Eurydice; Spanish Translation: Orfeo y Eurídice) is an opera composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck based on the myth of Orpheus, set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi. It belongs to the genre of the azione teatrale, meaning an opera on a mythological subject with choruses and dancing...

Christoph Willibald Gluck - Orfeo ed Euridice (Vienna Version-1762)
Nancy Argenta / Michael Chance / Kammerchor Stuttgart / Tafelmusik / Frieder Bernius
2xCD | EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 362 MB | Artwork: 38 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Sony Classical # SX2K 48 040 | Country/Year: Germany 1992
Genre: Classical | Style: Opera, Viennese School

Frieder Bernius began his career primarily as a conductor of choral music, focusing largely on repertory from the Baroque and early Classical periods. Gradually he took a greater interest in orchestral music while still maintaining a preference for choral works. He has favored authentic performance practices and has become one of the leaders in the historically informed performance (HIP) movement. (…) Bernius began recording with Sony Classical in 1989, and among his most successful early recordings for that label was that of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1992), with Nancy Argenta and Michael Chance. Along with his successes in the recording studio in the 1990s and first decade of the new century, Bernius continued to lead many highly acclaimed concerts at home and abroad with his three Stuttgart ensembles.