Don't expect great waves of lush orchestral sound to wash over you — a la Verdi, Puccini and Wagner — at Virginia Opera's mesmerizing Virginia premiere of "Orphée" at the Carpenter Theatre.
Composer Philip Glass' 1993 take on Jean Cocteau's 1949 surreal film classic of the same title begins by burbling along like a mountain stream on a sunny day.
But listen up. There's infinite musical coloration in all those rhythmic repetitions. Glass can pack as many varied notes into a minute as Mozart. And watch out. Black rain clouds are moving in to turn that playful stream into a raging torrent when emotion demands.
It's commonplace to characterize Glass as a minimalist composer, but there's nothing very minimalist about "Orphée," in which Cocteau's screenplay literally became Glass' libretto.
Glass' opera is tuneful. It erupts into mini-arias when the emotional stakes are high. It speaks in a modern musical idiom but, in its capacity to achieve the exaltation we expect of any opera, it's as operatic as opera gets.
Above all, this production revels in mystery as Glass and Cocteau put their surreal stamp on the often-told and just as often-embellished Orpheus myth.
Here the title character is a modern-day poet who is too popular for his own good. His fellow poets ridicule him. He becomes mindful of his mortality when his beloved wife, Eurydice, dies. He follows her into the land of the dead, where he becomes enmeshed in the romantic designs of the mysteriously alluring La Princesse, and is torn between his impulses toward life and death. Unlike many retellings of the Orpheus myth, this one has a conventionally happy ending.
Director Sam Helfrich revels in the mysteries at the heart of "Orphée" in a modern-day set that suggests an artists' salon full of mirrors.
His physical production originated at the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., and that's essentially what we see on the Carpenter Theatre stage.
Through the clever use of look-alikes, Orphée and the other characters pass through mirrors as they travel between worlds. Magic gloves, cryptic radio messages and motorcycle riders who look like astronauts enhance the otherworldly feeling.
So does Helfrich's knack for turning stylized movement, often in slow motion, into arresting stage pictures.
Matthew Worth, the University of Richmond music graduate who has parlayed his rich baritone into a career as an interpreter of Mozart and contemporary opera, leaves nothing to be desired as the tortured Orphée. He's as adept at creating an achingly vulnerable character as he is at putting Orphée across vocally.
The two leading women — Sara Jakubiak as Eurydice and Heather Buck as La Princesse — bend their supple sopranos to their characters' often-anguished demands. The rest of the 12-member cast does what is expected of them, often more, except for Jeffrey Lentz, whose tenor, as La Princesse's somewhat sinister chauffeur, is thin and fails to hold its own in the ensemble. Conductor Steven Jarvi and his large orchestra negotiate Glass' intricate score with ease.
"Orphée" is sung in French with supertitles in English.
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