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‘Orfeo ed Euridice’ review – David Cairns

OPERA – The world’s leading opera magazine reviews The Ryedale Festival Opera – Orfeo ed Euridice in its October edition

Ryedale Festival at the Hovingham Hall Riding School, July 19.

Thanks to John Warrack’s wise guidance and the skill and energy of its young music director, Justin Doyle, the annual Ryedale Festival is an event that draws music lovers from well beyond the moors and dales of North Yorkshire to its two weeks of opera, concerts, theatre, lectures and community drama.  This year the opera was Gluck’s Orfeo. . . .the briefer, tauter original (version) with which Gluck inaugurated the reform of opera in 1762. . . and Doyle and his slimmed-down forces made a riveting drama of it in the close quarters of the Hovingham Hall Riding School. . .

. . .Thanks, above all, to three excellent soloists, the music-drama struck home.  Robert Ogden, the Orfeo, is a rare and exciting find, a counter-tenor without a trace of the outlandish hoot that afflicts some of his tribe – a singer who, on the contrary, makes the voice sound completely natural and who uses it intelligently and with great intensity.  His long agonising scene with Bibi Heal’s Euridice in the third act – the marvellously fluid mixture of recitative, arioso and duet that was Cluck’s great achievement – gripped us all.  She was his equal, a soprano who impressed as Blonde in last year’s Entfürung and whose voice in the meantime has grown in strength and lustre.

Susan Gilmour Bailey’s piquant, saucy Amore, Doyle’s well-paced, vital conducting, and Warrack’s eloquent new translation from Calzabigi’s Italian all contributed to a performance that triumphantly transcended its material limitations.

DAVID CAIRNS

Photograph by Tracey Phillips - Ryedale Photography, Nunnington, North Yorkshire. View pictures of the 2007 Festival on - www.ryedalephotography.com