Customer Reviews

Orphée aux enfers

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
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I had the good fortune to pick up a copy of this production from the UK, and I certainly hope it becomes available in the US for the sake of fans of Jacques Offenbach and Natalie Dessay.

For those not familiar with the story, it's a burlesque of the Orpheus & Eurydice legend--he's a skirt chasing narcissist, she's a slut, and the gods are even worse. This is not Gounod or Massenet, but operetta at its best.

Even at this early point in her career, Natalie Dessay is the consummate singing actress, and she proves herself a deft comedienne, too. Not belle but tres joli, this diva in the making is the best of an excellent French ensemble, and it's easy to believe that all the men want a piece of her.

This is truly an ensemble piece, and it's hard to single anyone out (bravi!). The balance between singing and acting is nearly perfect, moving effortlessly from spoken dialogue to sparkling arias and some fine dance numbers; no single element overwhelms the others. By sticking to the story, farce though it is, the production is an immensely funny piece of theatre. The scathing social commentary (implied, not preached) is as current as it was 150 years ago. A few other standouts:

Yann Beuron's Orpheus is marvelous. Only in the first act is Orpheus a significant character and his duets with Eurydice and L'Opinion Publique are well choreographed and genuinely funny. He actually manages to make the vain, jealous musician sympathetic.

Laurent Naouri proves as deft a comic as his wife (Dessay), and with Jean-Paul Fouchecourt carries the action from the second scene onward. The fly duet especially combines some virtuoso singing with a bawdy, comic love scene.

Among the minor gods, Etienne Lescroart's Mercury singing his aria in a chorus line with the dancers is a highlight, and Cassandre Berthon's Cupid is so charming that you forget she's singing a male role.

Is there anything wanting? I didn't think so, but the performance was originally shot for television and seems a bit dark at times. Some will be put off by the modern albeit somewhat surreal sets and costumes or the fact that all the dancers (men and women) wear female costumes. That's their loss

Natalie is the ultimate Euridice with marvelous acting and incredible singing. She generously sprinkles sparkling high G's throughout the show. If she couldn't sing she would have been a famous comedienne. The rest of the cast is delightful. Bethone's Cupid, Naouri's Jupiter, Beuron's Orphee, Olmeda'a Public Opinion, all singing the wonderful Offenbach music. The Fly Song, The Kissing Song...

I could do without the trasvestite dancers (maybe fast forward was invented for that)......but after all, its a French production.

I've converted Offenbach haters to Offenbach lovers with this video!!

The bad? I have seen plenty of transvestites around, but to get them in here is rather overkill - even if it is a French production. I would have preferred a better can-can too at the end - a tad crowded and the dance itself gets lost - better so, because it is a mostly male cast of dancers. I wish they hadnt dressed up Dessey as a Tart most of the time. It kinda gives the impression that one has to be a tart to have a mind of ones own as regards lovers, especially since Euridice was supposed to be ravishing looking - the daughter of Aphrodite. Bad....

The Good? Absolutely everything from the conductor (Minkowsky is perhaps at his best here) to all the singers. Although I sort of missed the overture, at the end, with the type of treatment that the operetta gets here, it wasnt too badly missed.

My first DVD of this got stolen, and if I was tempted to buy another one paying more than what I did for the first one, you can be assured it is worth it... am reputed to be a miser....

I'm a relative newcomer to opera, just "discovering" it a year ago. This is my second opera dvd (with the Diana Damrau "Die Zauberflote" being the first) and as much as I liked that, this has eclipsed it. Virtually the perfect opera and staging for the interested opera neophyte, as it has a shorter running time than most operas (2 hours), and the music is consistently wonderful as are the performances. Hilarious throughout, and I highly recommend anyone who considers opera to be stuffy and esoteric to watch the Duo de la Mouche, easily findable on a certain popular video site. The all-French cast handles the language with ease and fluidity, as can be expected. What really puts it over the top is the winning and hilarious performance of Natalie Dessay, a coloratura soprano known as much for her acting skills as her wonderful voice. I truly can't recommend this enough.

Any negatives? The occasional typo in the subtitles. Traditionalists may be put off by the male dancers wearing women's garb, though they are just picking nits.

Gets my highest recommendation.

I was a little disappointed in this production. The first worst thing I noticed was that Pluto was sung by a man who had to have his first song rewritten: the original range was perhaps beyond him, and I noticed his voice was particularly harsh, compared with a classic LP of the opera I used to have. In fact all the performers were comparatively wanting in sweetness.

Even Dessay, though versatile, strong-voiced and hard-working -- she has a lot of songs -- acted well, but without the beautiful sexy coyness that earlier operetta stars brought to the part. Her voice was strong, and didn't suffer from narrowness of range, like Pluto's, but she was never quite light and funny enough. Her voice lacked charm and her acting lacked irony.

The production got tangled up a little in its modernization. For example the cancan was not danced by the performers, in two senses: dancers were brought on when the cancan was played, and what they danced was not the cancan. Cancan in French means "scandal," and we could hardly be scandalized by the dance itself -- women kicking up their heels and showing their legs -- when the dancers were already bare-legged, had been throughout the show, and the male dancers were cross-dressed, also from the beginning. The dancers' cancan was a series of uninspired tumbling of the female dancers over the male dancers' knees: not scandalous and barely adequate as choreography.

Stuffier old-fashioned costuming all around would have helped, since the plot is about how both Orpheus and Eurydice are in love with other people and only stay together because of the pressure of public opinion. Maybe that atmosphere is too dated to reproduce for a modern audience, but the modern substitute is inevitably a little incoherent.

I was going to show the opera to a friend as an example of Offenbach at his best, but my friend is skeptical about Offenbach and this production is too heavy to convert her. Offenbach doesn't require just good singing and acting; it requires mastery of a particular light operatic style, and that style's great masters may not be around any longer.

It was still a pleasant show for a fan like me.

JACQUES OFFENBACH'S ORPHÉE AUX ENFERS (ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD)
a production by the Opéra National de Lyon, ArtHaus Music, 2009.

I was not familiar with this work when I bought it. I only ordered it because Natalie Dessay is in it. The box calls it an Opera Buffa. Were Offenbach German, for a second or so I thought it might have been called a singspiel. [The word in German means 'sing-play'. But believe me it bears little relationship to the singspiel I know best, The Marriage of Figaro, so I abandoned that notion post-haste. Singspiels are in every way an opera except in an opera the connections between arias and other melodic parts are declaimed as recitatives, usually accompanied by harpsichord, cello, or orchestra, whereas in a singspiel they are spoken. A recitative is vaguely similar to a chant. Very vaguely.]The liner notes claim Orphe'''e was the first operetta when it premiered in 1858. Whatever the appropriate category, I call it outrageous, x-rated fun, full of comedy, farce, and slapstick.

The story is a takeoff on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld, where he goes to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. I shall not betray the plot and spoil your fun, but here are some of the incidentals that make it a sketch: The cast all have Dr. Spock ears. The Corps de Ballet is composed of men and women, both in traditional ballet dress. Two of the chorus are visibly pregnant. The Greek dramatic `Chorus' is replaced by `Public Opinion', a woman who reminds me of a prude in my childhood church. Jupiter (called `Jupie' by his relatives, gods and demi-gods on Olympus) is at war with Pluto (his brother and the god of the underworld). Juno, Jupiter's wife, runs around in an old fashioned corset (or something like that; I am not too up on women's underclothes of times before the present) and turns out to be bald. The Olympiad gods, demi-gods, and relatives of Jubie's revolt against the boredom of heaven and of having his providing them only with nectar and ambrosia, instead of the Lyon sausage brought up to Olympus by Pluto from Hades, in snowshoes, using ski poles. Venus and Cupid return in the early morning to Olympus after separate one night stands on earth. There is a drunken orgy in this afterword. And Eurydice and a giant fly make love all the while singing `Zz. Zz. Zz."

The music ranges from the intricate, complicated, and adroit to the familiar (Can-Can). All of the voices are superb, with Dessay at her usual brilliant best as coloratura and actress (in this case, comedienne).

This production of the Ope'ra National de Lyon was recorded live in 1997. Dessay, singing with it, relative to the Op'era de Paris reminds me of Beverly Sills at the New York City Opera relative to the Metropolitan Opera. I respectfully suggest that you watch it with a bunch of your musically aware buds with lots of wine flowing. You will understand why I say this by the end of the show.

Dessay is an operatic genius, if one is permitted to speak this way. Most singers, when they play a role, make it plain they are first and foremost singers, not actors. Even the best of them, in which the acting is superb, never let you forget their primary occupation. Not Natalie Dessay. When she acts I forget she is a coloratura par excellence. I forget even that she is acting. She is her role, whether in DVD's as Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann (the funniest characterization I ever saw in an opera) or as Mad Ophelia in Hamlet (where the audience with incessant clapping will not, absolutely will not let her arise from the floor at the conclusion of the scene). But the voice is always there. No matter how her body is contorted by the Director or she is moving about to express the role, it is ever the same--beyond belief.

This is another of the many great productions of Laurent Pelly. It has everything you would expect from his other work. Natalie Dessay is is a charmer in her role going from bored wife to play thing of the gods. Lots of humor, great music, acting and dancing even a tiny hint of sex.

Nice performance, quite entertaining, but this is one of Offenbach's weakest compositions. It is by far less quality than his last one "The Tales of Hoffman". In the present Operetta one can see Offenbach's mediocrity, rather than his genius that was exposed only later.
Natalie Dessay's performance, though is worth watching. ... and the last half an hour becomes very catchy.