OPERA North’s concert version of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice arose from lockdown restrictions. The show was recorded last year in an empty Leeds Town Hall and subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Both Fflur Wyn as Euridice and Daisy Brown as Amore, goddess of love, reprise their roles for the current performances in Huddersfield, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham and Salford Quays.

Alice Coote returns to Opera North for the first time, since her portrayal of Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther, to sing Orpheus at all performances bar one. Last Wednesday evening’s was the exception that I am glad to have experienced.

Polly Leech, a talented young British mezzo soprano much in demand across Europe, made her Opera North debut as Orpheus. Leech oozes youthful ardour and displays an agile and creamy voice which is coloured to compelling effect. The famous Che farò senza Euridice? (What is life to me without thee?) conveyed grief and anguish to a level at one time perhaps uniquely associated (by an earlier generation) with Kathleen Ferrier or even Jean Grayston.

Though described in the blurb as “a stripped-back concert performance which elevates the emotional power of the music;” the version seen at Leeds Grand might be more accurately described as semi-staged. This meant in practice, a choreographed chorus dressed in black with the three costumed principals, on an empty black-box stage decorated by a starlit night sky backcloth.

In the pit, Antony Hermus conducts a baroque-sized Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North. An energised account of the overture gives a foretaste of the clarity and pace of this production.

So Opera North’s exploration of the Orpheus myth is complete, or is it? A long overdue revival of Offenbach’s delightful parody Orpheus in the Underworld would have lifted what has been, in terms of the orchestral resources deployed, a thin main house autumn season.