The suite’s first movement is a tour of the underworld: its watery percussion sounds, its “strange high-pitched noises, like a tea kettle always boiling over.” Near the end of the movement, we hear a strange sound from the contemporary world: the keening wail of a New York subway train pulling out of a station. Eurydice, newly arrived in death, hallucinates that she is alone on some unknown train platform, waiting for someone—she can’t quite remember who—to meet her.

The second movement pays a visit the world above, where Orpheus (in the guise of a solo clarinet) mourns luxuriantly. He drops a letter into the earth, hoping it will reach the underworld; and as his music fades away, we return down below, where Eurydice’s father patiently builds her a room out of string. In the third movement, the string section embodies the slow weaving of that delicate room.

The fourth movement is a phantasmagorical montage of the opera’s final act: the disastrous walk toward the world above, and the many missed connections that lead to every character being dipped once again in the river of forgetfulness.

–Matthew Aucoin