The Classical Review

In recent years Music of the Baroque has traditionally opened a new season with a big vocal showpiece, presenting such works as Haydn’s The Creation, Handel’s Jephtha, and Mozart’s Requiem.

To launch 2025-26, Dame Jane Glover led her MOB forces in a more intimate work, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice Monday night at Chicago’s Harris Theater. 

Gluck’s 1762 opera draws upon the Greek myth of the musician Orfeo (Orpheus) who descends to the lower regions to restore his beloved wife Euridice to life. He is allowed to rescue her provided he does not look at her until they are out of the underworld. Orfeo cannot resist her anguished entreaties, however, and he turns to gaze upon her with tragic results.

Gluck’s lean, 90-minute setting remains a unique achievement and a milestone in opera. Gluck brought a new and straightforward simplicity to the genre with Orfeo ed Euridice, sweeping away excesses of the French baroque, and focusing on the essential drama at the heart of the story. (He also amended the scenario to provide a happy ending.) Glover opted for the tauter, original Vienna version, with some sensible edits and conflation of elements from the later French revision.

Orfeo is the dominant presence in this three-singer work and Monday night’s successful performance at the Harris Theater benefited greatly from having Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in his role debut as the bereaved Orfeo.

Since his Chicago bow with the Newberry Consort in 2017, the American countertenor’s career has been on a fast ascent. He has gone from strength to strength in subsequent local appearances including MOB’s aforementioned Jephtha in 2022 and a CSO Handel program last season.

Monday night’s performance likewise benefited from going beyond the standard sit, stand, deliver, and sit again tropes of concert opera. Indeed, the cast’s overtly theatrical approach made for a surprisingly fiery and dramatic account of an opera that is often presented in a historically minded, low-key style.

From his entrance, Cohen was fully in character as the grief-stricken Orpheus—walking slowly to the front of the stage, sitting, burying his face in his hands and keeping them there for several minutes as he sang his opening music.

Cohen’s countertenor instrument is a wonder—uncommonly rich in tone, evenly projected throughout its range and able to surmount all technical hurdles. At times in Act I, one wanted a more varied and specific expression amid the prevailing mournful melancholy.

But in his first assumption of this role, Cohen was largely impressive, singing with pure and mellifluous tone. He delivered a plaintive, dynamically shaded rendering of “Chiamo il mio ben così” and made “Che farò senza”—the opera’s most celebrated aria—not just a rapt vocal moment but the dramatic peak of the entire opera.

Euridice is a short and thankless role with the character of Orfeo’s not-alive wife virtually invisible until the final act. She then goes in seconds from intense relief and love to despair and hatred, repeatedly haranguing Orfeo for his refusal to look at her, like an eschatological Mrs. Bickerson.

Heidi Stober commanded the stage in the opera’s last half-hour, singing Euridice with full tone and striking intensity. Her emotional performance brought credible depth to this underdeveloped character, making the couple’s climactic confrontation genuinely compelling rather than just absurd. As the distressed Euridice, Stober even collapsed to the Harris stage floor and lay there motionless in her elegant evening gown for several minutes while Cohen sang Orfeo’s famous aria. Purists may posit that such a quasi-verismo approach takes Gluck’s opera out of period but there was no arguing with the effective theatrical results.

In this fast company, Hannah De Priest held her own as Amore, singing vibrantly and with an aptly bright and youthful tone.

After a somewhat fussy Overture, Glover’s direction was virtually faultless, with MOB’s longtime music director drawing vivid orchestra playing and convincing, subtly varied tempos in a work dominated by slow music. She brought great vitality to the contrasting underworld music, as with the violent string accents, and a buoyant lift to the joyous finale. The conductor also artfully spotlit the chalumeau—the clarinet’s predecessor—and Zachary Good’s atmospheric playing added a striking woody timbre to the orchestral palette.

Under the direction of Andrew Megill, the MOB Chorus performed at its usual standard of excellence. At times one wanted more fluent section blending in the early going, but the ensemble singers brought snarling relish to the Furies and clarion jubilation to the final chorus.

Nicholas Kraemer leads Music of the Baroque in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (minus No. 5), 3 p.m. October 12 at the North Shore Center in Skokie and 7:30 p.m. October 13 at the Harris Theater. baroque.org