It's raining at Amsterdam's Muziektheater. Armide impresses at De Nederlandse Opera.

It's raining at Amsterdam's Muziektheater.

When Crusader Renaud sings of an idyllic landscape half an hour after the performance begins, the curtain rises deliciously slowly. It adds a breathtaking dimension to the opera, which until then had been set on a small and sparse landscape on the front stage.

We see a stylised pond with ditto trees in which it is gently raining. Moments later, it really starts raining: an endless stream of confetti, coloured purple in the light, falls down and effortlessly transforms the unity décor from a love garden into a desert, from a barren and desolate landscape into a forest populated with monsters. The oh's and ah's are not out of the blue.

With good reason, because Barrie Kosky's direction, Katrin Lea Tag's set and especially Franck Evin's lighting, combined with the outstanding soloists and the Gluck's conductor Ivor Bolton, who recovered at lightning speed after a somewhat awkward beginning Armide an experience.

And it could so easily have gone wrong. Because go figure: an opera about a Syrian sorceress and a crusader in Damascus in wartime - it's too easy. But fortunately Kosky finds an updating here "offensive" and, above all, "conceptual wallpaper". So goes Armide on revenge, hatred and all-consuming love, personified in Karina Gauvin.

Everything in the opera revolves around her: Armide. Kosky rightly notes: 'Gluck was not interested in the men in his story. All the threads converge solely on this woman, whose frustration stems from her unfulfilled dreams.'

Indeed, they are not at all sympathetic, those crusaders, and even Renaud only falls for Armide thanks to her magic. Sounds like Tristan und Isolde, but where Wagner's Tristan is a complex character, Renaud is merely the personification of Armide's desire - once he comes to his senses, he leaves her with barely any compassion. And although the enchanted love palace is reminiscent of both Wagner's Flower Garden (Parsifal) as Mount Venus (Tannhaüser) they are not real, but only a dreamscape.

That Wagner was inspired by Gluck, by the way, is not surprising (Wagner himself made a 'German' Iphigenia in Aulis); like Gluck, he wanted to reform opera by returning to its primal form by using his music to 'render the expression with the greatest clarity and strengthen the declamation of the text'. In Paris, of all places, Gluck did just that by using a libretto that Lully had successfully interpreted a century earlier - without changing a single letter. An almost Nutcracker-like action against the established tradition,'the old music'.

It used to go like that, now it goes like this.

And so away with all those runs, trills and cadences, but capture the core of the drama. The core that is already in the very first scene, when Armide's confidants party, but Armide herself tells of a terrifying dreamscape in which love and contempt destroy her, even though she already knows better: 'By incomprehensible magic, when he pierced my heart, I could not possibly resist him despite everything.'

Kosky shapes the whole opera as this vision of fear, in which thanks to the clever lighting and confetti streams that are so much more than cheap effects effects and in which worlds blur. You actually no longer know whether something is the beginning or the end of something and where dreams and nightmares become reality. As enchantingly beautiful as the idyllic landscape is, hatred, emphatically present as a character in the third act, literally comes out of Armide's body in this staging. Equally physical and bloody is the way she rips her heart out in the final scene when Renaud has left her. That it ends badly is shown just as nightmarishly: when Armide has called on the hate to banish love from her body but changes her mind at the last minute, the consequence of the hate strings up her likeness on the tallest tree. It is clear: in choosing love over hate, Armide puts her own neck in the noose.

So the title role is quite demanding. Karina Gauvin, who sang her very first Gluck role in Amsterdam, convinces vocally on all fronts. Her movements may still be a little uncomfortable, but at the same time this suits Armide, who throughout the opera doesn't really know what hit her.

Frédéric Antoun, announced before the start as having a bad cold, sounded anything but cold as Renaud, and the smaller roles were extraordinarily luxuriously cast, with Henk Neven, Karin Strobos, Julia Westendorp, Diana Montague and Ana Quintans (seductive dreamscapes don't come any better) in top form, aided by the excellent playing of the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra. In the first few minutes, the sound balance between orchestra and soloists was not optimal, perhaps due to the notoriously tricky acoustics of the Amsterdam Muziektheater, but conductor Ivor Bolton has so much experience even in this tricky venue by now that Armide, with which the Netherlands Opera concludes its series of Gluck operas, is one of this year's opera highlights.

Oh, and yes, there is indeed a real horse running around.