Some thoughts on the splendid new release from Les Arts Florissants:
What a delight to come upon Les Arts Florissants’s latest recording, Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice. As coincidence would have it, I’d just experienced their performance of another Orpheus story on stage at the Lucerne Festival this summer: Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, led by the ensemble’s founder, William Christie. Charpentier’s exquisite tragédie en musique breaks off mid-story, with Orpheus still in the Underworld and Eurydice’s fate unresolved. In its fragmentary state, Charpentier’s 1686 opera captures the stark tragedy of the myth: a descent without resolution.
Filed under: CD review, Early Music America, Gluck, Les Arts Florissants
photo: tenor Aaron Sheehan, who sings the role of Orphée (credit: Kevin Day)
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 