Beginner’s Gluck: how the 18th-century composer and a castrato changed opera forever

Over 250 years after Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice presented opera in a new way, an acrobatic staging aims to do the same. Iestyn Davies, whose Orpheus will be amid the tumblers, dancers and acrobats, writes of pushing boundaries – and heart-stopping wonderOperas tell stories; like all great art, the operas that endure don’t just tell stories – they reshape the way stories can be told. And it takes more than memorable tunes and a finely honed libretto to bring a piece into the hallowed pantheon of the operatic canon. Often it is the challenging of expectations that moves the dial for ever, permitting the art form to evolve, inspire and establish new ways of telling old stories.In my career as a countertenor opera singer I am often to be found singing the works of Handel, a composer whose oeuvre helped to define opera in the first half of the 18th century. Today, we often perform his operas in a style that befits our time; directors such as Katie Mitchell, Barrie Kosky, Richard Jones or Claus Guth push the singing actor far beyond what the famed castrati or prima donnas of Handel’s day were expected to do. And, as I prepare to take on singing Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice at the Edinburgh international festival I am acutely aware that its success will lie in both the staging and the piece itself. A quarter of a millennium ago Gluck’s work broke new ground by challenging audiences’ expectations. This staging with Circa will do the same. Continue reading...

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