Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Orfeo ed Euridice
Grand Opera’s rare treat hits Broward.
The sound coming from the Arsht Center stage is almost unearthly and totally unexpected unless you’ve seen the opera “Orfeo ed Euridice” or heard the distinctive sound of a countertenor before.
The voice that ascends to the heavens emanates from a slight-of-stature man. But if you close your eyes, his high, liquid tremolo could just as easily be coming from a female mezzo-soprano.
Initially, it’s a bit of a shock to hear sustained, expressive notes in that register coming from a courageous hero. But Anthony Roth Costanzo is so skilled at genuinely occupying this territory — no falsettos here — that the audience is quickly seduced, as the Greek gods are, by his declamations of enduring love for his suddenly deceased wife.
For local audiences, this is a rare treat: FGO has never produced Christoph Willibald Gluck’s early groundbreaking work, and they rarely provide a countertenor a lead role. But casting a singer who can hit notes no Irish tenor would attempt is not a stunt. When Gluck composed the piece, it was scored for a castrato. When such singers became scarce, producers went with “high tenors” and finally began casting female mezzo-sopranos. Indeed, FGO alternated Costanzo with Lindsay Ammann, both making FGO debuts during the show’s run at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami and the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale. The Arsht Center performances ended Saturday.
The handsome and lithe Costanzo, who played the role in 2011 with the Palm Beach Opera, slips into the score and the considerable dramatic requirements of the role as if donning comfortable clothes. For two 40-minute acts, he sustains Orfeo’s unwavering (and a bit wearing) agony, punctuated with chillingly affecting moments, such as the lyric “I bring my own hell with me.”
He and conductor Anthony Barrese have designed notes at the end of a phrase in which Costanzo starts softly but perfectly audible, then lets it swell before letting it subside into nothingness. Occasionally, Costanzo lets his voice fall to the bottom of this register, reminding the audience that this not a trick or a recording, but the result of arduous training.
The opera is drawn from the Greek myth of the supremely gifted musician Orpheus, who persuaded the gods to allow him to go into the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice.