Wasted talent

A collaboration between Jean Cocteau and Philip Glass, even though it necessarily had to be posthumous, sounds like a bad idea, and so it proved to be in an admirable production by the Royal Opera of Orphée at the Linbury Studio. This two-act opera played continuously for 100 minutes, so there was no escape. I think it is the only work of Glass’s that I have sat the whole way through, and I don’t intend to repeat the experience. During Glass’s operatic heyday — I take it that has now passed — I went to a couple of his operas at the Coliseum, but left relatively early on in each of them, convinced that there would be only more of the same.

It seemed to me to begin with that Orphée was surprisingly charming, if at the same time irritatingly fey. The director Francisco Negrin staged it very simply, with the performing space a coffin-shaped area in the centre of the theatre, the audience sitting on either side of it; and with room underneath it, too, for the most subterranean passages. The 13-part orchestra and conductor were perched high up, there was a synthesiser, and microphones were used tactfully so that the singers could roam at will and still be heard clearly. That resulted in a mildly blurred effect, which may have been kind to some of the French accents. But the notes sung sounded more exact than the words.

There was every evidence of careful preparation, and the cast, largely of Young Vilar artists (as was the conductor Rory Macdonald, though his assignment was much less ambitious than it would be in almost any non-Glass opera one can think of), was of an exceptionally high standard, with no weak link and at least four singers of remarkable maturity.