Just in case you need reminding, this year marks the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, the work generally acknowledged as the first opera. Predictably there has been a great raft of projects to mark the event - not all of them great. The Edinburgh festival featured an "authentic" staging by Belgian director Gilbert Deflo, which looked like a room full of bored guests standing around at a particularly joyless toga party, and the American Repertory Theatre brought Orpheus X, a dodgy updating which turned the hero into a cocaine-gorging rock star.
Yet by far the worst contribution to the anniversary celebrations was a new staging by Christopher Alden at Opera North, which was quite the most patronising, puerile and staggeringly arrogant opera production I've seen for some time. Alden set the action in what appeared to be the day room of a rehabilitation clinic for 1980s drug casualties, whose therapy involved sticking each other to the walls with parcel tape. Some weeks later a journalist colleague who had interviewed the director informed me that the production was supposed to have been set in Andy Warhol's Factory (a reference which must have been lost on more than just me, as the programme made no indication of this or contained any Warhol-related imagery whatsoever). Armed with this new insight, my perception altered. The scales fell from my eyes and Alden's production was revealed to be even more atrocious than I'd originally thought.
Opera North has redeemed itself slightly by also producing She, So Beloved..., an intriguing gallery installation designed by avant-garde film-makers, the Brothers Quay. The piece has been inspired by Monteverdi's opera and Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, Orpheus Eurydice Hermes, which is full of nightmarish imagery of the poet's wife taking root in death. The visitor enters a darkened space, illuminated by candles and groaning with Monteverdi's gloomy music, to find themselves in Quay-land, an eerie place containing a gothic perspective box in which a model of the underworld can be glimpsed through a tangle of fallen power lines and blasted trees.
A phantasmal, filmed ballet flickers the opposite wall in which baritone Simon Keenlyside nuzzles his real-life partner, dancer Zenaida Yanowsky, in a scene from the opera choreographed by Kim Brandstrup. The most enigmatic exhibit appears to be some form of cosmic map, or possibly a splurge of ectoplasm, but turns out to be an anamorphic diagram which, when viewed from a certain angle, resolves to form the image of Orpheus's lute.
The experience isn't a complete substitute for a decent production of the opera, but it's a beautifully produced journey to the dark side of the Quay Brothers' imagination. Brandstrup's choreography has a spectral grace, with Yanowsky pliably encompassing Rilke's description of Eurydice as "fluent, sinuous as hair." And Keenleyside's rich, lachrymose baritone is arrestingly unusual in a role more commonly sung by a tenor. If you happen to be in Leeds city centre it's well worth popping in - it's the best trip to Hades you'll make all week.
• She, So Beloved... is at Leeds City Art Gallery until December 31 2007.
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