Mark Morris Choreographs Orfeo Ed Euridice In Metropolitan Opera

James F. Ingalls returns to the Met stage as lighting designer. Met Music Director James Levine conducts the four-performance run through May 12, 2007. The performances are dedicated to the memory of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

David Daniels, who made his role debut as the grief-stricken Orfeo last season in Chicago, becomes the first countertenor to sing the role at the Met. Orfeo's wife Euridice, lost to the underworld, will be sung by Latvian soprano Maija Kovalevska, (replacing Lisa Milne, who had previously been scheduled to sing the role). Heidi Grant Murphy, whose roles for the company have ranged from Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier to Nannetta in Falstaff, sings Amor, the god of love who reunites the couple.

Not since 1953, when George Balanchine directed The Rake's Progress, has a choreographer directed a Met production. For Morris's interpretation of the original 1762 version, a chorus of 100 singers and a small corps of dancers, including members of Mark Morris Dance Group, will join the principals on stage. The production is pared down to one single-unit set and no intermission in order to showcase the dramatic force of the music and dance.

The premiere of Orfeo ed Euridice this season marks the first time the opera has been presented by the Met in 35 years. Gluck's opera in three acts was first performed in Italian in Vienna in 1762 for the Emperor Francis I, with the famous castrato Gaetano Guadagni singing Orfeo. (The composer's 1774 revision, prepared for the Paris Opera, gave the male title role to a tenor and added several pieces to make the work, now sung in French, grander.) The Italian Orfeo ed Euridice was the first of Gluck's reform operas, in which he tried to bring a new kind of simplicity to both story and music, replacing the complicated intrigue and vocal extravagance of Baroque opera seria. -- www.metoperafamily.org