It's hard to know what to expect from a modern-day revival of Berlioz's 19th-century French revival of Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice, or Orphee et Eurydice, as it becomes in French. For Welsh Nat ional Opera's new production, seen at the Grand Opera House in Belfast this week, the issue may seem all the sharper, with a period-instruments specialist like Paul McCreesh in the pit.
In the event, it was actually the musical elements which were least rewarding. Too much of the orchestral playing was rough and ready. Too much of the choral singing was ragged, with individual voices protruding insensitively.
And some of the solo singing failed to engage meaningfully with this key 18th-century opera. Katarina Karneus certainly conveyed the heavy burden of the doubly-bereaved Orphee, but she did so in a mechanical, uninvolving way.
Natalie Christie projected with greater appeal, but not always ideal technical security, the joy - and pain - of Eurydice. Jeni Bern's L'Amour, a puffed-up courtier to the others' plain-clad garb, had the animation to ensure the liveliness of her interventions.
The real pleasures of the evening, however, were mediated through the eye. Producers Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser and designers Christian Fenouillat (sets) and Agostino Cavalca (costumes) created moody tableaux by apparently simple means. They engineered scenic transformations that had a touch of magic. They showed that the artistically profitable life of the painted flat is far from over yet. And they weren't afraid of flying L'Amour on a wire to the heavens as a closing coup de theatre.
But, striking as these achievements undoubtedly were, they really constituted only secondary pleasures. Opera for the eye was hardly what Gluck or indeed Berlioz ever actually had in mind.
