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by Christoph Willibald Gluck, directed by Robert Carsen

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

October 9-25, 2025

Chorus: “Trionfi Amore, / E il mondo intero / Serva all’impero / Della beltà”

The Canadian Opera Company has revived its 2007 production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, one of the great masterpieces of the operatic repertoire. The COC’s production, a co-production with four other opera companies, is directed by world-renowned Canadian director Robert Carsen and is one of his most brilliant creations. Orfeo is sung this time by Iestyn Davies, of the world’s foremost counter-tenors and is conducted by Bernard Labadie, conductor of Les Violons du Roy, Montreal’s famed period instrument ensemble. All these elements combine to make this Orfeo ed Euridice an evening of sublime beauty.

Toronto has seen two other versions of Gluck’s opera – the Orphée et Eurydice that Gluck revised for French tastes in 1774 and another French version from 1859 revised by Hector Berlioz. These productions were staged by Opera Atelier in 2007 and 2015, respectively. The COC production is of Gluck’s original Italian version of 1762. This much sparer version is the most influential of the three because best reflects Gluck’s goal of restoring opera to its origins as sung drama.

Since the physical production of the opera is the same as it was in 2011 and since Christophe Gayral has meticulously recreated Carsen’s direction, my description of the production in 2011 is still accurate. I wrote that “Carsen’s production reflects the severity of Gluck’s vision in Tobias Hoheisel’s set that consists only of a raked gravel-covered rectangle back by a blank cyclorama, reminiscent of the minimalist productions of the Wagner operas by Wieland Wagner in the 1950s. Carsen has updated the action to sometime in the present and to somewhere where women still wear headscarves daily. Hoheisel’s palette throughout is entirely black, white and grey, with the only colour coming from the flowers strewn on Euridice’s grave or the yellow of the flames seen in all three acts. The austerity of the production is reinforced by Peter van Praet’s lighting which set low in the wings causes the singers to cast shadows across the entire stage or through frequent backlighting that makes us see much of the action in silhouette. Both techniques, of course, underscore the imagery of the opera about a man who travels among the shades of the underworld to bring back his dead wife.

“Carsen has made the work more abstract than Gluck’s original. Gluck’s librettist Raniero de’ Calzabigi did not follow the Greek myth when he gave the story a happy ending. So Carsen is justified in modifying the story further. His Orpheus is no longer a semi-divine musician, but rather an Everyman responding to the death of a beloved wife. He has no lute or musical instrument of any kind. The one object associated with him is a switchblade that represents his recurring despair and desire to take his own life. He subdues the shades of Hades not through the magic of his song but through the intensity of the love it represents”.

With a chorus and only three characters, Gluck and Calzabigi sought to make opera more clearly reflect the structure of ancient Greek drama. As in ancient drama the chorus is a character in itself. In Carsen the chorus in Acts 1 and 3 does not represent the nymphs and shepherds that the libretto specifies but rather ordinary men and women of the village where Euridice lived who mourn her death and try to comfort the grief-stricken Orfeo. In Act 2, Scene 1, the chorus does not represent the Furies as in the original but the souls in Asphodel of those who have led unexceptional lives. In Act 2, Scene 2, it represents, following the original, the souls of the Elysian Fields reserved for the most virtuous where Euridice now dwells.

The COC Chorus is justly praised for the beautifully blended sound of its music-making. What this production highlights is the Chorus’s outstanding talent in acting and movement. When the Chorus as mourners file past Orfeo after they have buried Euridice, each member consoles Orfeo in a different way as they file past him. The chorus movingly demonstrates that Euridice’s death has affected the entire community, but also that they are fully aware how grief-stricken Orfeo, as Euridice’s husband, must be.

No movement director is listed so the task must have fallen to Gayral as revival director. The precision of the Chorus’s movement is central to the effect Carsen wishes to achieve. They are often backlit so that their silhouettes become a key element of the design. The Chorus excels in this endeavour as if all its members has been schooled as dancers. When Orfeo visits Asphodel, the shades there, still in their shrouds, turn away from the visitor in sequence while striking symbolic attitudes of shame, a movement sequence strikingly executed by the Chorus.

British counter-tenor Iestyn Davies is renowned for his Orfeo and it is truly a privilege to be able to hear him in the role in Toronto. His fully, amber-hued voice has a naturally plaintive tone. Davies’s singing is so arrestingly beautiful right from Orfeo’s first notes that Orfeo’s best-known aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” does not stand out but rather feels integral to the wide emotional arc that Davies has been tracing. Davies’s ability to use dynamics and tonal colour to bring out the full implications of the text is an onstage masterclass in singing. As if this were not enough Davies is also a fine actor and is able to differentiate the varying levels of fear, despair and courage that battle with Orfeo until the finale.

As Euridice, Québécois soprano Anna-Sophie Neher shines with a luminous, full voice. Neher is able to make Euridice’s emotional shifts from wonder to doubt to anger to joy feel perfectly natural to someone who has so unexpected been resurrected.

Together Davies and Neher generate almost unbearable tension when Euridice ever more forcefully presses Orfeo to look at her while his resistance, despite knowing the awful penalty, gradually falters. When Davies’s Orfeo finally did break down to gaze fully on Neher’s Euridice, one could hear a collective gasp from the audience.

Catherine St-Arnaud, a young soprano from Quebec, is a sprightly Amore, a ray of brightness in a doom-laden world. Her voice is notably lighter than either Davies’s of Neher’s and is not always able to soar over the 44-member orchestra.

In 2011 Harry Bickett was able to draw a sound from the COC Orchestra that amazingly approximated the sound of an ensemble of period instruments. Now Berbard Labadie accomplishes the same feat with élan. Alert tempi, never too brisk and never languorous, continually heighten the drama of every situation. What I noticed this time, unlike in 2011, was the gorgeous interplay of the orchestra, Orfeo and the off-stage banda serving as an echo in Orfeo’s extended aria “Chiamo il mio ben così” of Act 1.

Thie current production of Orfeo ed Euridice is filled with exquisite moments like this where the music-making, design and performances combine to produce an embodiment of heightened emotion that make people love opera. If you saw the production in 2011, you will want to see it again with Iestyn Davies. If you did not see it, this time you must.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Iestyn Davies as Orfeo and Anna-Sophie Neher as Euridice; COC Chorus as souls in Asphodel with Iestyn Davies as Orfeo; COC Chorus as souls in the Elysian Fields with Iestyn Davies as Orfeo, © 2025 Michael Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.coc.ca.