MUSIC REVIEW : Berlin ‘Orpheus’ at Home in Brooklyn

NEW YORK —  “Orfeo ed Euridice,” in the original version Christoph Willibald Gluck wrote for Vienna in 1762, is a short, direct, perfectly proportioned Age of Enlightenment opera. A minimalist of his day, Gluck strove for what he called “beautiful simplicity,” and he succeeded with some exceedingly pretty music.

There is nothing pretty, however, in “Orpheus und Eurydike,” a disturbing German-language production of Gluck’s famous opera imported from the mean streets of East Berlin to the even meaner ones of Brooklyn. In this updated, grimly urban “Orpheus,” a pop singer--sung by a male alto who is just weird enough to become opera’s version of David Bowie--loses his glamorous wife, Eurydike, and descends into the hospital hell of a mental ward.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York’s primary venue for presenting avant-garde European opera productions and major new music theater, has done it again.

Opening its third season Monday night with “Orpheus und Eurydike” from the Komische Oper in Berlin, BAM Opera has become the first North American company to stage a production by Harry Kupfer.

As the director of Komische Oper for the past decade, Kupfer is the latest guardian of the innovative and influential tradition begun by Walter Felsenstein, who founded the company in 1947.

Felsenstein--who insisted on making opera into viable contemporary, psychologically motivated and (in the Brechtian East German Marxist tradition) political theater--proved one of the most influential of all postwar opera directors, and much of the modern operatic updating fashionable today is a direct result of that influence. Less universally copied, however, has been Felsenstein’s insistence on astonishingly thorough musical and theatrical preparation.

On the evidence of this 1987 “Orpheus,” which has become one of Kupfer’s calling cards and had a successful tour to Covent Garden in 1989, Felsenstein’s high standards of ensemble seem to have been maintained at the Komische. Musically, it is an intriguing, individual performance, one that succeeds well even on a new Capriccio recording. Nor could anyone accuse Kupfer--who has lately had large, if controversial, successes at Bayreuth and in Britain and the Netherlands--of failing to create an unrelentingly forceful theater.

Completely unsentimental, Kupfer presents the original Vienna score (lacking the famous ballet Gluck wrote for a later Paris production) without intermission and as a parade of increasingly jarring images: black-and-white slide projections of the ambulance that fetches Eurydike’s body, a threatening surgical setup, zombie-like patients (some Elysian Field, this!) and Orpheus fleeing not with Eurydike but only her video image on a portable TV.

In his quest for realism, Kupfer never allows Orpheus and Eurydike a final reunion, and Orpheus sings his aria, “Che faro senza Euridice,” as a rock ballad in remembrance of his dead wife.

At its best, Hans Schavernoch’s debris-littered scenery has the kind of textured grittiness of a Joseph Beuys assemblage. But then there are the large revolving mirrors, in motion throughout most of the 80-minute performance. Possibly someone less susceptible to vertigo than this writer might have found such constant refracting of light and image effective, but I doubt that I was alone in leaving the theater feeling queasy.

If the mirrors didn’t get you, Joachim Kowalski, a German male alto with a hyperactive publicity machine, might. No prissy, white-toned countertenor, Kowalski exploits a forceful, modern vibrating singing full of elaborate dramatic emotion that produces a peculiarly androgynous effect coming from a singer with rock-star good looks. But he also, unfortunately, exploits unflagging overdone expressions of Angst on stage.

More of a discovery was the arresting Eurydike of Dagmar Schellenberger-Ernst, an exciting and beautiful young German soprano. Christiane Oertel sang Amor plainly from the chorus, which was dressed (men and women) in tails and ramped along the right of the orchestra pit, while a young boy blankly acted the role.

Hartmut Haenchen conducted a properly small and capable modern orchestra with attention paid period practice niceties, such as sharply etched textures, energetic tempos and vocal ornamentation. But those damned revolving mirrors made even all his energy seem strangely unsettling. East Germany, as reflected in this 4-year-old production, is simply not a place for niceties.