OK, I'll start a thread for him.
The blue period Gluck oprpheus.............This is an early and short review I wrote on this production for another site, and it was my first contact with this opera. You can see that I went liking it more and more (I was typing the review while I watched it). Nowadays I like it even more, but I'll post the original review anyway. At the time I didn't even focus on the singing, and apparently I didn't have for Patricia Petibon the appreciation that I now have.
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Gluck's Orphée, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, with the Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique at the Châtelet, with Magdalena Kozena as Orphée, Madeline Bender as Eurydice, and Patricia Petibon as L'Amour.
So far so good: beautiful overture, gorgeous opening chorus, and Orphée's lament is fabulous. Looks like a winner.
Edit - more than half-way through, very beautiful music, but a little monotone. This staging is so static that it looks more like a concert version. Singers move so slowly, with weird fixed gestures, and the colors are only blue and green. Visually beautiful but it gets old fast. Thankfully this opera is short.
I know I shouldn't be judging it based on the staging but rather on the music, but I'm not very enthusiastic so far. It's delicate, melodious, and dreamy, but also a little boring.
I guess this one will be a B for me.
Supposedly the ending will have happy and lively music, but a happy ending for the Orpheus myth is a little strange so I don't see how it will earn more than a B from me. We'll see.
Edit 2 - This aria is certainly very beautiful:
A B+, then.
Finsished. A beautiful ending. On its own merits a B++ very close to an A, and given its historical importance in shaking up opera seria, should after all get an A-.