Seattle Opera’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ takes advantage of more intimate venue

Opera review

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Presenting operas for online streaming rather than in live performance was just one way Seattle Opera dealt with pandemic restrictions, as in last season’s imaginatively filmed production of Jonathan Dove’s “Flight” at the Museum of Flight, a neat stand-in for the airport in which the story is set. Another — as it is doing for its current production, of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1762 “Orpheus and Eurydice” — is to take advantage of Tagney Jones Hall, the airy glass-box recital space in the northwest corner of Seattle Opera’s new Opera Center, which serves as the company’s headquarters, at Fourth Avenue North and Mercer Street.

Christina Scheppelmann, Seattle Opera’s general director, intends to stage one opera each season in the recital hall, either as part of the regular subscription season or as an extra event, said spokesperson Joshua Gailey. This will enable the company to offer one-acts and smaller works often neglected by professional opera companies but which would get lost in McCaw Hall.

But the decision was also practical as well as aesthetic: It “did also provide a bit more security in planning our first season back in person … Staging operas in Tagney Jones is cheaper than staging them in McCaw Hall, and since we were unsure what demand (or the COVID outlook) would look like at this point, the smaller-capacity venue presented an opportunity to try something exciting and new while also posing a slightly smaller risk,” Gailey said in an email.

“Orpheus and Eurydice,” which runs through Jan. 30, fits nicely in Tagney Jones Hall, the intimacy intensifying the emotional impact. It’s a small-scale opera to begin with; two-thirds of the cast are named right there in the title. The story is the familiar Greek myth, opening after the death of Eurydice, the love of master musician Orpheus. (In this double-cast show, the roles were vividly sung opening night, Jan. 12, by Ariana Wehr and Christopher Ainslie.) He mourns until Amore (Sharleen Joynt), the personification of love, tells him he can retrieve Eurydice from the underworld, but she sets up the journey as a test of their trust: He must lead her back up to Earth without looking back at her. Eurydice balks and Orpheus succumbs to her pressure, resulting in an understated final aria, his solo lament for his twice-lost love.

Scenic designer Carey Wong has left the performance area, at one end of the hall, empty but for the 11-player orchestra on one side, with projected backdrops of abstract visuals differentiating between the earthly and hellish realms. The familiar tale, sung in Italian, is left largely unsubtitled; translations for the increasingly argumentative encounter between Orpheus and Eurydice during the attempted rescue are discreetly projected to one side, but for most of the show, a smattering of words conveying just the gist of what’s being sung become an effective graphic element in the backdrops: “I want to be alone,” say, or “Feel pity for my sorrow.”

The first-rate orchestra, drawn from the Seattle Symphony, is led by Stephen Stubbs, as is a chorus of the same size. The chorus stays offstage, saving money on costuming but leaving three dancers (Jaclyn Wheatley, Vincent Michael Lopez, Kaitlyn Nguyen), representing infernal spirits, to bear an awful lot of the burden of providing visual interest. The active choreography, keeping them leaping and writhing like the flames of hell, is by Donald Byrd. At just over an hour, this scaled-down production takes telling, if not the fullest, advantage of a congenial and promising venue.