Mainly Opera and Ballet
Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas are in a sense mirror images of one another. The Gluck starts with a tragic death and ends happily, the Purcell is the reverse. Gluck’s opera, first performed in Vienna in 1762, had a great effect on what came later in Germany and was particularly influential …
For Gluck’s tercentenary Buxton has produced his Orfeo ed Euridice (the 1762 Italian version) to counterbalance Dvořak’s delightful Jacobin. It is a good match: Dvořak was a Czech composer, but so in a sense was Gluck, who was brought up in Bohemia and studied mathematics and logic at the University of Prague. This opera was a …
The best thing about this performance was the beautiful singing of Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo, and the conducting of Gluck’s wonderful music by James Levine.
