Every culture, in its oldest stories, sends someone into the dark for love. The Greeks had Orpheus and his lyre; the Egyptians had Isis; the Sanskrit tradition gave us Savitri, who followed the god of death himself.
Opera Siam begins in that shared human hunger with the Thailand premiere of Gluck's Orfeo Ed Euridice, reimagined through Thai Buddhist cosmology. It will be staged in the Great Hall of King's College International School Bangkok, Ratchadaphisek Road, on Saturday at 2pm and 7pm (gala) and Sunday at 5pm.
The underworld where Orfeo enters is not a shadowy Greek cavern but the hell realms of Thai Buddhist cosmology -- blazing, vivid, almost hallucinatory, the same realms that gaze down from a thousand temple murals. Over this unmistakably Thai landscape, Gluck pours his great 18th-century score, music so pure in its grief it sounds written for exactly this crossing.
