SFO’s Disappointing Account of Gluck

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the first of five performances of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. The production was directed by Matthew Ozawa, whose past engagements with SFO have included The Barber of Seville and Fidelio. (The former was the “drive-in” performance, which marked the first “live” performances following the closure of the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center due to the COVID pandemic. The second took place in the Opera House the following October.) For this particular offering, Ozawa required a generous amount of choreography, conceived and realized by Rena Butler. The conductor for the production was Peter Whelan, making his SFO debut.

Three of the six dancers performing in Orpheus and Eurydice (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

The title of Ozawa’s note for the program book was “The Stages of Grief.” The note made no mention of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who had conceived the five-stage model of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance; nor did it have anything to say about her stages. (Bob Fosse demonstrated a much clearer understanding of the concept in his film All That Jazz.) Indeed, Ozawa seemed more interested in examining brain images provided to him by the University of California at San Francisco. How that led to projections and choreography executed on a sometimes rotating circular stage was left to the imagination of the viewer, who may have been less puzzled than I was about what this all had to do with the Orpheus myth.

Indeed, Ozawa’s production almost relegated the vocal performances of Gluck’s score to the background. This was particularly disappointing for countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński, who had originally been scheduled to make his SFO debut in the 2020 revival production of George Frideric Handel’s HWV 27 Partenope, first performed in the fall of 2014. Mind you, he had to work with highly demanding requirements including not only choreography but also acrobatics. (His experience as a breakdancer clearly prepared him for those requirements.) Soprano Nicole Heaston, on the other hand, spent most of her time high above the stage itself, resorting to a circus swing as an alternative for the wings of Cupid (“Amore” in the cast listing). The role of Eurydice, sung by soprano Meigui Zhang, was relegated to the background; but that had more to do with the score than with Ozawa’s staging. Nevertheless, I was more than a little puzzled to find that the most familiar music from Gluck’s score, the “Melody” section of the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” seemed to have been omitted last night, leaving enquiring minds to wonder why. Perhaps someone assumed that the music would reawaken painful childhood memories of recorder lessons.

Given that so little of this music is familiar and that a relatively straightforward narrative is stretched out over a duration of about 90 minutes, Ozawa probably felt a need to draw upon his own devices to keep the audience’s attention. On the basis of last night’s experience, I would give him credit for succeeding. Nevertheless, the musical side of my attention had a hard time focusing on both vocal and instrumental performances while being bombarded with so much eye candy.