NEW YORK — For a trip to hell and back, the Metropolitan Opera’s season-closing revival of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Eurydice” is journey full of pleasures.
The “beautiful simplicity” that Gluck called his “greatest labor” in setting the Orpheus myth (and the “noble simplicity” that poet Ranieri de’ Calzabigi similarly sought in his libretto) are carried through in every aspect of choreographer Mark Morris’s resuscitated staging. And just as that 18th-century duo dispensed with the excesses of Baroque opera-seria, Morris’s production — which premiered in 2007 — strips the myth into spare conceptualism with regularly scheduled wow moments. It’s a crisp, clean, often amusing and thoroughly enchanting production — the kind of thoughtful, uncluttered opera of which we could use much more.
