When Gluck took on the Orpheus myth, 18th-century opera was in a rut. Ahead of a new Covent Garden production, John Eliot Gardiner explains how the composer created a rich amalgam of text, music, ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. When Les Arts Florissants was founded in 1979 it put period performance firmly on the map in France. The ...

Viola player Aliye Cornish is not usually seated centre-stage at the Royal Opera House, and she’s certainly not used to playing while being lowered up and down on a huge platform. She kept a diary ...

In May of 1774, 15 years before the French Revolution, the 18-year-old Marie Antoinette ascended the throne as queen of France. Less than a month before that, German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck ...

Here are a few more things worth knowing about the documentary flick. Gluck Orphée et Eurydice starring Magdalena Kožená, Madeline Bender, Patricia Petibon, John Eliot Gardiner has a Not Rated rating, ...

Juan Diego Flórez dazzled audiences and critics alike when he played the virtuoso role of Orphée in La Scala’s first ever staging of Gluck’s opera in its French version: “Juan Diego Flórez delivered a ...

THE OPENING night of the Royal Opera’s 2015/2016 season provides several pleasant surprises in its first staging of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s revised French version of Orphee et Eurydice. What ...

What appears initially to be a concert performance set on a black box stage swiftly turns into an exhilarating part of the action. The entire orchestra of the English Baroque Soloists, with Sir John ...

I can tell you all this because I attended the Paris Châtelet productions in 1999 from which these recordings come. You won’t find it in the documentation accompanying the DVDs, because there isn’t ...

Gluck composed his most famous opera for Vienna in 1762 in Italian, later reworking and extending it for Paris in French, which is the version we hear in this live recording made last summer at Madrid ...