When the Metropolitan first mounted its present production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in 2007, I gave it a pass. I feared that this landmark work, so aesthetically fulfilling, dramatically gripping, and spiritually liberating if performed well, had already been dealt a mortal blow, at least locally, by the New York City Opera’s jab at it a few years earlier, directed by Martha Clarke and starring the falsettist Jochen Kowalski. Faced with the prospect of a fresh bout directed by the jokey choreographer Mark Morris, with another falsetto voice (David Daniels’) assigned to the passionate utterances of the title character, I didn’t really care to be witness to the knockout punch. And for reasons I can’t presently reconstruct, I missed an interim revival with Stephanie Blythe. This year, with the contralto Jamie Barton, whom I had not heard live, cast as Orfeo, I decided to give it a try.

This presentation was as close to a non-event as it is possible to come with the level of professional skill present at a major opera house. Still, it happened, and I was there (I saw the performance of Oct. 29). So, strictly for the record and before moving on to other things, this skeleton review:

Edition: 1762 unadorned, the hardest of all available choices to enliven—the most dependent on vivid music-making, riveting dramatic characterization, rapturous dancing, and evocative production.

Orchestra and conducting (Mark Wigglesworth, cond.): Underpowered for the house, bland and uncommitted, having neither the sharpness of attack and pungency of timbre of a good period ensemble nor the symphonic grandeur of a full, strongly led modern pit orchestra. Noticeably less present and alive than the similar grouping for Iphigénie en Tauride in 2007, under Louis Langrée.

Physical Production (Mark Morris, dir. & choreographer): Set (Allen Moyer, des.): For Acts 1 and 2 (the mourning, the descent, the Gates, Elysium—90 intermissionless minutes here), an ugly, multitiered metal structure that when deployed made more noise, relative to the music being played, than the notorious Lepage pile for Der Ring. On it: the chorus in seated rows, costumed in fancy period dress (Isaac Mizrahi, des.), as audience to what is “enacted” below. This audience said to include historically identifiable figures, but this not discernible from the front Balcony. Thus, the chorus of demons, shades, etc. not participants in the drama, though singing their assigned parts. A distancing device, a “perspective.” Below this, a semicircle of barren floor space. For Act 3 (the ascent, the reprieve and celebration), a slanting upward path on a stoney wall, with a barrier that conceals the performers’ bodies from waist down; then, as above.

Staging and “Personenregie“: A panto-choreo mélange of unremitting triviality. The members of the corps, dressed in contempo-cazh and tight little suits, scurry about, jump up and down, take movement-class lunges. Orfeo is given a few abstract signing gestures. Morris’s idiom was a somewhat better fit with Rameau’s Platée at the NYCO in 2000, when he at least had his own dancers to work with. But that opera is at best a moderately enjoyable piece of light entertainment, of about the same weight as, say, Anything Goes, but much older, and French, and with distinctly less memorable tunes.