Even in 1957, when it was first issued, this was an old-fashioned performance. Only, it seems to me, the most stolidly unimaginative of audiences need to have an Orpheus singing at male pitch, to put some sort of dramatic credibility ahead of the music itself: but that is how it was often given in Germany, with the castrato role of Orpheus transposed down an octave from the itch in Gluck's original Italian version and thus quite differently related to the high voices and the orchestral texture, as well as casting a penumbra of darkness over the work as a whole. Of course, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sings much of it quite exquisitely, in his way (which isn't an eighteenth-century way), and ''Ach, ich habe sie verloren''—you may know it better as ''Che faro senza Euridice''—has some lovely, gently passionate singing, though it does become heavily romantic at the end. But he is also apt to be hectoring: if I were a Fury my heart wouldn't be much softened by his appeal near the end of Act 2, and were I Eurydice I should be more than content to return to the Elysian Fields when spoken to thus at the beginning of Act 3.
Ferenc Fricsay's direction, characteristically, is wonderfully disciplined, but the style, with so many rallentandos, awesomely hushed moments, profoundly slow tempos and other such expressions of fulsome romantic passion, is alien to Gluck. The smaller roles are neatly done by Rita Streich and, especially, Maria Stader, who is truly moving in her warm singing of the solo music in the chorus near the end of Act 2. From my reference to that number the alert reader will realize that this performance follows a mixture of the Italian version and the French, including a number of favourite pieces from the latter (the flute sounds uncomfortably flat to me in the ''Dance of the Blessed Spirits'') but a very modest number of ballet movements, with none at all at the end.'