Kentridge Directs Glyndebourne's First-Ever L'Orfeo
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- Glyndebourne stages Monteverdi's 1607 L'Orfeo for the first time, with William Kentridge directing and Jonathan Cohen conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on period instruments including theorbos, a lirone, viols, and three keyboards played simultaneously by Cohen (harpsichord, organ, and a 'regal' organ).
- Kentridge's staging centers La Musica as the creative force, with the set built as an artist's studio blending Bauhaus design with elements shipped from his Johannesburg workspace and featuring his own charcoal drawings and video projections that transform the stage.
- Kentridge expands Eurydice's role beyond her original 12 lines of text, giving her physical presence through movement and keeping her on stage at the end 'trying to find her voice,' interpreting her as having an 'unheard song' alongside Orpheus's.
- The production is set around 1920, drawing on Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, layering what Kentridge calls 'five stops along the way': the Ovid original (2,000 years old), Monteverdi's 1607 score, the 1920 setting, and 2026 audiences.
- Krystian Adam, singing Orfeo, compares his aria 'Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi' to 'a modern pop song' that 'could go to Eurovision,' arguing baroque music's improvisational flexibility makes it sound adjacent to jazz, rock, and pop.
- Francesca Aspromonte sings both La Musica in the prologue and Eurydice, the production's first time at Glyndebourne, noting she values the festival's chance to 'meet the other casts of the other operas' beyond singers' usual isolation.
Why it matters: Glyndebourne is filling a notable gap in its repertoire with what many consider opera's founding masterpiece, still performed 419 years after its 1607 premiere. Kentridge's hand-drawn projections and artist-studio aesthetic offer a distinctive visual vocabulary for a work where the score's relationship to the text was itself radical, and where Eurydice's near-silence has long been a dramaturgical problem worth rethinking.
