2023-05-28 11:33:00
Start of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, rigorously reduced.
“Che farò senza Euridice – Oh, I’ve lost her”: When there were still concert requests, this aria was one of the regular hits, whether sung by mezzo-sopranos in Italian or by older baritones in German. Yes, what should Orfeo/Orpheus do without his beloved wife, now lost for the second time?
The fact that Christoph Willibald Gluck laid a song-like, simple C major melody over undemanding accompaniment down the throat of his broken mythical hero, which usually unfolds at a strictly moderate tempo, has also brought him a few wrinkled noses over the centuries: Where is it the raging pain, the expressive gesture? One of the most prominent Gluck skeptics was none other than Nikolaus Harnoncourt. The fact that Orpheus gets his emotions under control all too quickly and nobly and knows how to pour them into controlled beauty may still irritate some in the audience in 2023.
Up to the moment when Cecilia Bartoli and Gianluca Capuano interpret this music – and the relaxed melody suddenly transforms back into its presumable original form: a heated “Aria agitata” like later in Mozart’s Cherubino’s “Non so più” or, translated into purely instrumental form , in the first movement of the great G minor symphony.
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#Bartoli #sings #Glucks #Orfeo #sounds #expressive
