Gluck’s Opera Best Served by Conductor

This afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second viewing of the current San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. The first thing I need to do is correct an error in my first account of this production. The “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” is a ballet episode in ABA form, the middle section being the “Melody” that is popular with recorder lessons. That was the music performed during the current production. The music that is performed both before and after the “Melody” is the “Air,” which features  an elaborate flute solo is in the A section. In this production only the “Melody” is performed.

As far as the staging is concerned, I still feel that Director Matthew Ozawa was so preoccupied with his “Stages of Grief” and the projection of neural networks onto the platform on which most of the action takes place that any resemblance to the Orpheus myth was purely coincidental. In my own humble opinion, I found that my primary source of satisfaction was the conductor Peter Whelan. My seating this afternoon provided an excellent account of almost everything taking place in the orchestra pit. When the score called for an “echo” effect in the first act, Whelan realized it with a separate seating for a quintet consisting two violins, a clarinet, a viola, and a cello, which served the needs perfectly without overplaying the effect itself.

Nicole Heaston singing from a great height (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

In addition, where the music was concerned, I was definitely impressed by the vocal talents of the only soloists in the production, countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński as Orpheus, soprano Meigui Zhang as Eurydice, and particularly soprano Nicole Heaston, whose exquisite poise allowed her to portray Cupid suspended at a great height above the stage floor. To those vocal soloists one may add the full membership of the SFO Chorus directed by John Keene, whose scoring often established the dramatic tension of a scene.

In other words one had a full complement of vocal talent to account for everything required by Gluck’s score. Those forces could not have been supported better by the SFO Orchestra and the insights of Whelan’s conducting. Personally, I would have been perfectly delighted to experience all of those resources deployed in a concert performance.