Recordings of Orfeo, in one or another of its several guises, have been flowing freely from the record companies just recently. This new one offers a 'pure' Italian version: the music exactly as performed in Vienna in 1762, with no accretions from the 1774 Paris revision or any of the other various editions that from time to time have been devised to improve on Gluck or to meet the needs of some particular occasion or artist. I'm all for purity, textually speaking: Gluck, of all composers, knew what he was doing, and the Italian Orfeo in its original form packs an emotional punch in its 80 or so minutes that no other version can equal. But that presupposes a performance capable of realizing the nature of Gluck's expression of passion, and in that the present version falls woefully short.
There is, in fact, just one moment in this recording when it sparks into life. That is in Act 3, in the recitative where Euridice takes Orpheus to task for his apparent neglect of her, and in the impassioned C minor aria that follows (''Che fiero momento'') Lynne Dawson rises to the challenge and, in singing that is powerful, natural and beautiful, fills the potential of the music. In the recitative that ensues, too, the drama is very much alive. James Bowman catches it, but only for a moment. His Orpheus is finely sung, of course; he is in better voice in this recording (made live in France last March) than I have heard him for a while, the tone firm and focused, and even right up to the top of his compass the articulation clean and sharp. But the effect is nevertheless detached and cool. I do not think this is endemic to a countertenor singing Orpheus: Rene Jacobs (Kuijken) managed to imbue it with passion, so certainly does Michael Chance for Bernius (to my mind the finest interpretation I have heard) and so does Derek Lee Ragin on the most recent recording (Gardiner). Bowman does not seem to identify with the character or to project the music as those singers do. The Act 1 strofe are pure and almost disembodied; even ''Che faro'' is coolly delivered.
For this I think the conductor, Jean-Claude Malgoire, is primarily to blame. From the beginning of the Overture, and the first bars of the opening chorus, it is clear that this is to be a detached 'objective' performance, lustreless and abstract in feeling. Has Malgoire, I wonder, misinterpreted the nature of Gluck's classical serenity and jettisoned the passion that is central to it along with the alien traditions of romantic expression? At any rate, that is how it comes over. Act 2, which should be 25 minutes as white-hot as any in the opera house, is just a routine run-through: the chorus of Furies unexcited and even somnolent, the orchestra perfectly neat but hardly breathtaking, as it ought to be in that marvellous moment at the beginning of ''Che puro ciel'', the final chorus (when Eurydice is restored) virtually expressionless. And the dances, each an exquisite miniature tone-poem, emerge flat, uninformed equally by the character of each dance and the situation it is intended to represent. It is impossible to think of anyone actually dancing to these leaden-footed readings.
The recording is clear and extraordinarily quiet for a public one (there is a single round of applause, at the end), with modest resonance. The wind are agreeably prominent. Claron McFadden sings Amor attractively, with some graceful phrasing in ''Gli sguardi trattieni''. There is an excellent note by Michel Noiray in an unusually well produced booklet. But the standing recommendations, for the Bernius/Chance and the Gardiner/Ragin recordings, are unaltered.'