There was an air of anxiety mixed in with the usual excitement of a season opening at the Stavros Niarchos Hall. The Greek National Opera had never staged L’Orfeo before, and this was no ordinary production: William Kentridge’s staging, co-produced with Glyndebourne and the Metropolitan Opera, heard for the first time with Nico Muhly’s orchestration for modern instruments. An all-Greek cast and conductor added their own note of trepidation, nowhere more than in the title role.
The evening opened with a reflection of that trepidation. Kentridge sets the opera in an artist’s workshop, the artist being Music herself, who is sung by Maria Kostraki. As she made the first stroke of her paintbrush, the projected stroke followed a split second later, and the orchestra a split second after that. There was the briefest moment of asynchrony. While fully forgivable on a first night, and never repeated in this performance, it still set the tone. An opera this old, based on a myth older still, can only exist in the imagination its artists and audience share, and that imagination works beautifully when it is built on harmony.
Bachtrack has already reviewed the staging at its Glyndebourne premiere, so a few words will do. The projections work best when they echo the music and set the scene: in the underworld, the dancers pull us through the drawings into a setting that is eerie and timeless in its discomfort. Elsewhere, fragments of poetry, Rilke among them, start arguing with the libretto from the stage, like somebody else’s notes in the margins: words clashing with words. At times it felt like I was watching a Kentridge exhibition about Orpheus and a staging of L’Orfeo at once, unable to do justice to either.
If the projections sometimes argued, the music never did. Konstantinos Terzakis and the GNO Orchestra made Muhly’s score sound symphonic-native, unassuming and flowing, seemingly taking its pacing from the singers. The GNO Chorus merged with the orchestra so effortlessly that you no longer know where one ended and the other began, building to a true apotheosis at the end of Act 1. The shepherds’ harmonies were another pleasure. In Orfeo’s final lament, answered only by Echo, the interplay between voice and pit was almost stereophonic.
The crux, though, and the big mystery of the evening, was the title role. When Orfeo first appeared, the audience held its breath. Christos Kechris has built his GNO career largely on character roles, and this staging made him an inconspicuous man in a sea of admirers, no demigod. He was tentative and lyrical at first, holding back a little, as if this Orfeo was still an everyman. Like the staging, he came into his own at the gates of Hell. In “Possente spirto”, he traded phrases with the strings, and just as you thought the orchestra would drown him out, his voice rose and won. This type of theatricality takes us through every beat, from despair to resolve to hope to determination. His was a very modern Orfeo, a man made great by love that feeds into his art. I knew he would look back on the way out of Hell and it still made me gasp. By the end, a surprising piece of casting had become the evening’s triumph.
Marios Sarantidis’s Caronte towered over Orfeo physically and vocally, and Theodora Baka’s Proserpina was believable and complete in her love for humanity. Mary-Ellen Nesi did both the Messaggiera and Speranza justice. Only Petros Magoulas’s Plutone, though staged to impress, was somewhat flat.
Kostraki’s part was the most demanding of the women in both voice and physicality. She was on stage almost throughout, quite tender once she settled. When Euridice died, the projected world turned upside down, and her Music picked up pieces of artwork, turning them this way and that to make sense of it. Nosiphiwo Samente danced Euridice, so Music sang through her, and the split was the production’s most suggestive idea: dancer and voice, projection and libretto, just as any encounter with a work this old is split between the past and ourselves. “Così per troppo amor dunque mi perdi?” Must you lose me because you love me too much? It is a question for Kentridge, who loves this myth so much he perhaps risks losing the opera.
At the end, though, it all came together. Nikos Kotenidis was truly regal as Apollo, and his duet with Orfeo was beautiful: Kechris goes from humble humanity to accepting his demigod status, casting his own mirror-projection aside. Having gone through art, love and loss, he can shed his humanity and go home. The dancers stayed behind, and their final dance showed that mortals do not have that option. Our life goes on, messy and illogical, and only the gods can flee from their mistakes.
