Orphée

Orphée Hector Berlioz - Christoph Willibald Gluck The masterpiece by Gluck in Berlioz's version.

Cast Speranza Scappucci | Direction Ted Huffman | staging, set design, costumes Bart Van Merode | set design Sonoko Kamimura | costumes Pim Veulings | movement Bertrand Couderc | lighting Marie-Nicole Lemieux | Orphée Lauranne Oliva | Eurydice Camille Chopin | Amour Les Siècles Chœur du Concert Spirituel | Direction Hervé Niquet In a few words Orphée is the founding myth of the history of opera.

Monteverdi brought it to life first, Gluck would compose two versions, in Italian (where the role of Orfeo was sung by a castrato) and then in French (there by a tenor), before Berlioz gave it a new vocal and orchestral mantle.

Gluck's versions shook up Enlightenment Europe but, over time, suffered from numerous adaptations and corrections.

In the late 1850s, Berlioz was entrusted with the task of reworking the piece to adapt it for Pauline Viardot, a singing star of the period renowned for her range, moving easily from contralto to soprano.

Berlioz kept the French score but transposed the tenor part into a tessitura suited to Pauline Viardot and harmonised the keys, notably to adapt them to the instruments of his own era.

It is therefore this nineteenth-century version that Speranza Scappucci and Les Siècles offer us, the ensemble specialising in historically informed performance and well versed in Berlioz's repertoire.

To stage this allegory of music and poetry, the American Ted Huffman, recently appointed director of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, whose sense of spareness will plumb the depths of this drama of the intimate.

And who better than an artist of the 'calibre' of Marie-Nicole Lemieux to carry this operatic myth high, alongside the young Lauranne Oliva, already courted by all the great European stages.