Power shortage

Gluck wanted "beautiful simplicity." In Orfeo, the first thing out of the hero's mouth is one of the most direct and heartfelt cries of pain and loss in all opera: "Euridice! Euridice!" And after he can no longer resist Euridice's pleas to look at her and, defying the gods' terrible proscription, turns to face her, and then loses her for a second time, he sings one of opera's most profound yet shockingly plain arias, "Che farò senza Euridice" ("What will I do without Euridice?").

Ironically, Gluck's Orfeo usually seems more a relic than a reformation. It's been recorded more successfully than it's been staged. Balanchine's 1936 Met production, in which the singers remained in the pit while dancers enacted the story (a role model for Mark Morris's Dido and Aeneas), got only two performances, whereas his 1976 ballet Chaconne, which reduced the plot to mere suggestion, remains one of the most exuberant and moving of his late masterpieces. The opera is too intimate for big opera houses, and too grand for small ones. Most productions reek of dutiful, dreary pseudo-classicism. Even Arcadia can be deadly.

So it was with special eagerness that I looked forward to this new production not only choreographed but also staged by Mark Morris, in collaboration with Christopher Hogwood and the Handel & Haydn Society. Unfortunately, Hogwood's gifts as an opera conductor do not include particular insight into either large dramatic design or shapely moment-to-moment phrasing. The orchestra either chugged away (sometimes quite vigorously) or dawdled without nuance. The size of the nearly 4000-seat Wang Center compounded the problems. Could even a more skilled conductor here make audible Gluck's exquisite balances of tone and timbre? The chorus, in modern evening dress, stood on opposite sides of the wide stage, and the blurry split-second differences between the two halves were often maddening.

And poor countertenor Michael Chance. In his valiant effort to project the full and beautifully rounded (though largely inexpressive) head tones of his upper range into this cavern, his voice gave out before the one place he needed it most, the great "Che farò" aria, where Orfeo's emotional wipe-out was mirrored all too thoroughly in exhausted intonation and tonal depletion. All evening, Chance had problems with a nonexistent chest register: whenever his voice needed to descend, it also dissolved. Written originally for a castrato, the role has been more successfully sung by women (Alice Raveau, Kathleen Ferrier, Maureen Forrester, Maria Callas) than by men.

For his inability to convey the desperation of Orfeo's longing for his wife, though, Chance may not deserve all the blame. Tall, good-looking, with dark curly hair, and gowned in black with a purple sash, looking like Byron, he did respond to Morris's plastique with remarkable agility. In act two, with the help of the warbling wind section, he convinced you of the ecstatic beauty of the Elysian fields. No wonder Euridice was reluctant to leave.

But Morris the stage director, in his fourth opera gig, let Chance down by never crystallizing an emotional center. He depicted Amor, who gives Orfeo the stipulation not to look back at Euridice, as an unthreatening, purely comic figure, a cheeky Cupid (soprano Christine Brandes) who cleans his nails with Orfeo's suicide knife. In the Exit-from-the-Underworld scene, there was little chemistry between Chance and his Euridice, soprano Dana Hanchard (who projected hardly any voice at all). Without that sexual tension, Morris's intriguing idea of hiding one or the other (or both) of the lovers behind set designer Adrianne Lobel's loosely flowing MGM soundstage drapery (a sort of gigantic white-chiffon hospital curtain on noisy overhead tracks) had no point. Elsewhere, stock operatic gestures and poses dominated.

In the dances, especially the dance of the Furies, or the witty and touching rustic romp that Morris created to music Balanchine used for showing heavenly elegance (with equal tenderness and wit), everything suddenly came alive, as if this dance equivalent of theatrical incidental music moved Morris more than the story surrounding it did -- the very opposite of Gluck's radical intentions. Morris knows how to move people (even opera singers) around a stage. Few Orfeos have ever been so fluid. But his images rarely suggest any real engagement with the love story at the heart of this opera. Opening night, nearly 4000 people gave Orfeo a standing ovation. How much more would they have cheered if it were all it should have been?