Exquisitely stylish performance masks Glass’s lacklustre score
Orphée Eno/london Coliseum ★★★★★
One golden rule for composers embarking on a new opera must be to select a subject to which music can add something substantial. It’s just not worth the bother if all you can do is provide a background soundtrack. This is the primary failure of Philip Glass’s 1993 adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s masterly film Orphée: the score simply has nothing memorable to communicate.
Taking all its text directly from the film, Glass follows Cocteau slavishly, without ever creating anything that enhances the poetic mystery of Cocteau’s marvellous imagery – mirrors that melt and lead into the underworld; Death as a coldly beautiful woman in couture black who spirits away corpses in her Rolls-royce; Hades as a vast subterranean cellar containing a Gestapo interrogation cell.
Glass can’t match, let alone surpass, the imaginative intensity in all this. His contribution seems superfluous in comparison, lacking the propulsive drive and relentless ostinatos that give his Akhnaten and Satyagraha their mesmeric appeal: his Orphée is a musically gentle affair, pleasantly inoffensive but never illuminating of either character or action.
Although the vocal writing falls easily on the ear and the orchestration has a Gluckian transparency and simplicity, there’s no emotionally expressive power behind it, no compelling or coherent vision. When it lulled me into a trance, the taste of pink marshmallows came to mind, and the circular motion of Ferris wheels and carousels, and – oh dear – memories of Andy Pandy and the Flower Pot Men. Nothing nasty about it at all; nothing that stuck either.
The performance, however, was exquisite. Netia Jones’s production, predominantly in black and white, is stylishly choreographed and cinematically fluent through 18 brief scenes: episodes from the film are projected on to the panels of Lizzie Clachan’s chequerboard set, and even if Jones can’t match Cocteau’s genius for special effects, she creates an atmosphere of feverish dream.
But while he sings with unfailing assurance, Nicholas Lester struggles to make this self-absorbed fellow sympathetic, and there is something irritating about the doormat Eurydice too – no reflection on the excellent Sarah Tynan.
The two more engaging characters are the bluff chauffeur Heurtebise, vividly interpreted by Nicky Spence, and Death, a demandingly high coloratura soprano role that would have taxed Joan Sutherland, heroically taken here by Jennifer France, competing with indelible memories of Cocteau’s Maria Casarès.
Anthony Gregory, Clive Bayley and Rachael Lloyd provide strong support, and Geoffrey Paterson conducts the orchestra with self-effacing efficiency. The staging might well have had more visceral impact in a house half the size of the Coliseum, but this is by far the strongest offering of ENO’S (otherwise rather unhappy) Orphic season.
Until Nov 29, in rep with Orpheus in the
Underworld and The Mikado. Tickets:
020 7845 9300; eno.org