Dido and Aeneas, Guildhall, 9 June 2025

Milton Court Theatre

Images: David Monteith Hodge
Dido (Karima El Demerdasch)

Dido – Karima El Demerdasch
Aeneas – Joshua Saunders
Belinda – Manon Ogwen Parry
Sorceress – Julia Merino
Attendant, Second Woman – Hannah McKay
Witches – Seohyun Go, Julia Solomon
Spirit – Gabriella Noble
Sailor – Tobias Campos Santiñaque

Director – Oliver Platt
Designs – Alisa Kalyanova
Movement – Caroline Lofthouse
Lighting – Eli Hunt

Video – Mabel Nash  

Chorus (chorus master: Henry Reavey) and Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama James Henshaw (conductor)

This new Guildhall Dido and Aeneas, directed by Oliver Platt and designed by Alisa Kalyanova, was not the Dido of your expectations. I can be reasonably sure of that. Doors opened to reveal a club scene onstage, electronic music of a decidedly non-Stockhausen variety blasting through the small theatre. Dido eventually joined, dancing as if her life depended on it; perhaps, in retrospect, it did. Belinda too (if indeed these were there names). And then, suddenly everything changed. Purcell’s music was to be heard. In an unanticipated Dr Who-like shift – will the Queen of Carthage turn out to be the new Doctor heralded by Billie Piper? – we found ourselves in a very different world indeed. Its denizens took what they wanted from Dido’s handbag, re-clothed her, and left her generally shocked and bemused, apparently having no more idea what was going on than I did. 

Sailor (Tobias Campos Santiñaque) and Chorus

We now appeared to be in a rural English community, with straw figures, a maypole, and enforced country dancing, clothes suggestive more of the early twentieth century than Purcell’s time, let alone that of Dido and Aeneas. When Aeneas arrived, seemingly similarly abducted, he had no more idea what was going on. So far as I could discern, neither of them did throughout, brought together by the strange villagers, though again, neither did I. Punk-triffid witches did their thing. Aeneas eventually resolved to stay, Dido by then rejecting him, physically berating him, until he turned on her and seemed on the verge (at least) of sexual assault, until she stabbed him, after which she was led to the Maypole to be hanged. It was quite absorbing in its way and very well blocked and choreographed, but I really could not tell you what it was about or how it cohered. Was that the point? It may have been, given liberties taken – nothing wrong with that – for the missing music, but I suspect I was missing something. Was it perhaps all an unfortunate dream, arising from nightclub hallucination? I fear I shall simply have to admit defeat. 

Dido and Chorus

All in the cast, the excellent chorus included, threw themselves into this oddly compelling vision in wholehearted, committed fashion. Karima El Demerdasch’s Dido was first-rate, from wild abandon – difficult to imagine Janet Baker or Jessye Norman in this production – through fear and unease to final tragedy. Accomplished through the synthesis of words, music, and gesture that, put crudely, is operatic performance, this signalled not only great promise but great achievement. I am sure we shall see and hear more from her. Aeneas is, especially by comparison, a bit of a thankless role, but Joshua Saunders made a good deal of this bemused conception. Manon Ogwen Parry’s Belinda and Julia Merino’s Sorceress were both very well taken, as indeed were the other, smaller roles, Tobias Campos Santiñaque’s Sailor a winning ‘boozy’ moment in the spotlight. James Henshaw’s conducting complemented the punk-folk conception of the staging, more City Waites than Les Arts Florissants, let alone English Chamber Orchestra. It may not be how I hear it, but it is hardly how I see it either, and performance should always extend beyond ritual. There was, then, much to enjoy—and to puzzle over.

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Dido and Aeneas/Erwartung, 20 July 2023

Nationaltheater

Dido/A Woman - Aušrinė Stundytė
Aeneas – Günter Papendell
Belinda – Victoria Randem
Venus – Rinat Shaham
Sorceress – Key'mon W Murrah
First Witch – Elmira Karakhanova
Members of the opera-ballet of the Bavarian State Opera – Aaron Amoatey, Erica D’Amica, Ahta Yaw Ea, Arnie Georgsson, Moe Gotoda, João da Gracia Santiago, Serhat Perhat, The Thien Nguyen

Interlude:
Paweł Mykietyn (music)
Maria Magdalena Gocał (vocalist)
Jarowsław Regulski (sound design)

Krzysztof Warlikowski (director)
Malgorzata Szczęśniak (designs)
Felice Ross (lighting)
Kamil Polak (video)
Claude Bardouil (choreography)
Christian Longchamp, Katharina Ortmann (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Supplementary Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Sergej Bolkhovets)
Andrew Manze (conductor)

 

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Purcell and Schoenberg: my kind of double-bill. Puritan ‘authenticity’, or whatever it is calling itself at the moment, is so all-pervasive when it comes to the seventeenth century that the fantasy has had little chance—until now. To be fair, the Frankfurt Opera last season revived ts Barrie Kosky double-bill of Dido and Aeneas and Bluebeard’s Castle, but I am not aware of any previous pairing of Dido with Erwartung. (Bluebeard and Erwartung, by contrast, is an accepted if hardly frequent match.) But is it, is it really my kind of double-bill? I think so; I cannot see why not and could certainly come up with arguments, persuasive or otherwise, in its favour. Sadly, Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production does not mark his finest hour, reducing Dido in particular to a level of almost risible banality, despite the evening’s musical virtues. That was more the case once I had read dramaturge Christian Longchamp’s brief conceptual summary in the programme than when watching, when I (more or less) simply felt baffled. 

What I initially saw was a woman notably more serious than her fun-loving companions, but who did not in any sense appear to be Queen of Carthage or any such equivalent. She stayed in a glass cabin close to a forest, apparently North American, whilst they came and went, Aeneas and Belinda apparently conducting an affair or at least having casual sex. Dido seemed to be in some danger during the second act as the Sorceress and her – his/their, since a countertenor had been cast? – entourage surrounded the cabin. She held up signs saying ‘HELP’ and ‘VAMPIRES’, so I assumed the latter to be the US popular culture equivalent to witches. That made some sense (sort of), even if I could not discern any particular motive, let alone political element. 

Once she had died, a transformational ‘interlude’ began, offering film of a voyage through an endless tunnel, some electronic music by Paweł Mykietyn, and members of the opera’s ballet corps excellent in contemporary dance. Since Dido rose at the end of that and the ‘vampires’ had been busy for much of it, I presumed she too had become a vampire and would join them. Instead, though, she went back to her cabin, which at some point had mysteriously separated into two, and with a rifle shot Aeneas and Belinda dead without feasting on their blood. Erwartung consisted scenically of Dido in that half of the cabin and a dancer in the other changing his clothes and preparing dinner, which she went over to taste but may not have cared for, since she left more or less immediately. There you have it; there was more, but I am not sure it would help to go into further detail, even if I could remember it. 

The vampire thing was, for better or worse, a red herring. It seems that much of what we saw had been in Dido’s imagination, in a concept at least verging on the misogynistic. I may as well quote Longchamp’s scenario (also given in English translation) in full; there seems little virtue to paraphrase in this case.

 

On the edge of a forest, a woman named Dido lives in a house that does not belong to her. She is a fugitive. Nothing is known about her except that she comes from far away. Her behaviour, her recurring references to very old stories, her fears suggest a psychological fragility. Past and present, reality and imaginery [sic] are so intertwined in her that one does not know whether the mysterious figures and evil spirits that appear at times inhabit the forest or her mind. Dido feels a mad, exclusive love for a man who is also a fugitive, Aeneas.

Together with two women, also uprooted, they make up this provisional community.

One evening Dido immerses [s’enfonce] into the forest or into her fantasies. 

One major problem is that very little of that may reasonably be deduced from what one sees on stage. We surely cannot be expected to have read the programme before the performance; the production team needs to do some work here. Even a verbatim projection would have helped. More fundamentally, though, to reduce the character of Dido to a ‘madwoman’, quite divorced from matters of state or any plausible substitute, is a pretty poor production concept. Dido is not unstable; she is wronged. Aeneas is not an apostle of free love. And so on. For some reason, the fourth member of this ‘community’ is, we learn from the cast list though nowhere else, is styled ‘Venus’ and assumes performance of what is left of the vocal writing. I cannot tell you what part the goddess of love is held to play in this reimagined drama. Perhaps it is just a name. Video projections of forest deer added less than nothing. And moving into Schoenberg, might we not at least have had a spot of psychoanalysis? 

Were it not for the genuinely impressive contribution by the dancers, which did, in its way, link both halves, I could not give you a single argument derived from this double-bill for trying to connect the two operas at all. The problem lay far more with the treatment of Dido than that of Erwartung. Once reduced to the level chosen for Dido and divested of its dramatic interest, the stage was literally set for the rest: strange and a genuine pity, since Warlikowski has show in productions such as his Paris Iphigénie en Tauride and his Salzburg Bassarids, as well as his work in spoken theatre, that he is perfectly capable of dealing interestingly with issues of political power and eroticism. To have a ‘mad’ woman possibly/probably imagine strange things was, sadly, nowhere near enough.

 

Aušrinė Stundytė offered a powerful, indeed extraordinary locus of musical connection and certainly did what she could with Warlikowski’s scenario, her acting evoking pity, even sympathy, in the first part, even if we did not really know why. As Dido, she was vulnerable yet proud, her English diction superb. As A Woman, Stundytė mastered Marie Pappenheim’s libretto, Schoenberg’s lightning response, and the alchemy of their combination with an ease that gripped despite, not on account of, the staging. Colour, articulation, dynamic contrast, phrasing, and so much more combined to offer as complete a portrayal as we are likely to here. Above all, and like Andrew Manze and the Bavarian State Orchestra, she treated the drama musically and not as a succession of effects.

Manze is a musician of wide and generous sympathies. From a ‘Baroque’ violinist background, he has always shown interest in earlier and different performing practices. It seemed to me that he relished the opportunity to perform Purcell with this orchestra and on this scale; it certainly sounded that way. There were a couple of odd textual decisions I did not follow, but this was a reading tender and powerful, ably supported by the excellent work of the house’s ‘supplementary’ chorus in the pit. However wide those sympathies, I doubt Schoenberg would be the first composer anyone would associate with Manze, but he did a fine job here too, very much at one with Stundytė’s approach, enabling the orchestra to present a host of voices, near-Brahmsian possibilities taking different turns with all the dramatic-psychological implications that suggests. Balance and colour were equally well projected, in what emerged as a grand operatic scena, almost an outsize accompagnato, albeit one that seemed over – as, in any performance worth its salt – in a thirty-minute flash. 

Aeneas is a dramatically thankless role, all the more so in this production, but Günter Papendell did what he could, emerging with credit. Victoria Randem greatly impressed as Belinda, her clear, stylish, yet never remotely precious soprano just the thing for the role. She can certainly act too. Key'mon W Murrah made an excellent musical case for a countertenor Sorceress in a performance of considerable dramatic verve. There was, indeed, nothing to disappoint on the musical front, and much to admire. What a pity it was to have memorable performances so sorely let down by a disappointing production.

Dido and Aeneas and Bluebeard's Castle, Oper Frankfurt, 5 June 2022

Frankfurt Opera House

Dido – Cecelia Hall
Aeneas – Sebastian Geyer
Belinda – Kateryna Kasper
Second Woman – Karolina Bengtsson
Sorceress – Dmitry Egorov
First Witch – Elizabeth Reiter
Second Witch – Karolina Makuła
Spirit, Sailor – Carlos Andrés Cárdenas

Bluebeard – Nicholas Brownlee
Judith – Claudia Mahnke
Prologue (on tape) – Benedek Salgo

Barrie Kosky (director)
Alan Barnes (revival director)
Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Joachim Klein (lighting)

Zsolt Horpácsy (dramaturgy)

Frankfurt Opera Chorus (chorus director: Tilman Michael)

Frankfurt Opern- und Museumsorchester

Benjamin Reiners (conductor)

First Witch (Elizabeth Reiter), Sorceress (Dmitry Egorov), Second Witch (Karolina Makula)
Images: Barbara Aumüller

The operatic double-bill presents problems and opportunities—like any staged event, one might say, though there are of course specific cases for each genre, even vis-à-vis spoken theatre. First, at least in most instances, comes the question of what to programme together, that is assuming one has rejected the obvious solution of leaving a shortish one-act opera on its own. Practices change: we now rarely programme Salome or Elektra with another work, although once this was far from uncommon. Bluebeard’s Castle is more often heard in concert, which permits a broader range of companion pieces; in the theatre, it has also attracted ballets and even concert works, Katie Mitchell’s recent Munich staging having been presented with Bartók’s own Concerto for Orchestra. Another companion, at Salzburg, Covent Garden and the Met, has been Erwartung: the timings work well, as do the complementary dramatic trajectories. In New York, Jessye Norman played both Judith and The Woman, quite a feat. Dido and Aeneas has likewise had various operatic partners, as well as none; ENO’s After Dido, again directed by Mitchell, presenting the opera within a larger theatre piece. Only last month, I saw an HGO performance paired with John Blow’s Venus and Adonis. In our enclosed musical world, ‘early music’ all too often siphoned off as a thing-in-itself, rarely to be performed with modernist works, or even on the same instruments, one interesting dramatic solution can rarely if ever have been attempted before: Bluebeard and Dido, both treatments of a proud woman’s fate. Step forward Oper Frankfurt and Barrie Kosky, in their 2010 production (taken to the 2013 Edinburgh Festival), now revived in Frankfurt for the fourth time. 

A further major question lies in how far to connect the stagings and performances. Calixto Bieito’s pairing of Bluebeard with Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi for Kosky’s home territory of the Komische Oper Berlin presented what we might think of as a strong yet subtle combination of the two, leading connection not only through scenery but action and ideas, without forcing it. Kosky seems more content to let us do the work: no bad thing necessarily, and it may (more or less) simply reflect the differences between the works. The closest I could come to a guiding thread was use of space, physical and metaphysical. When Dido opens, we see a crowded bench, somewhat cramped, with what may be a theatre audience, or at any rate a representation of the cast and (postmodern?) society featured. There is stereotypical Kosky action, whose silliness will irritate or not according to persuasion, albeit in more of an alienating, even Brechtian way than twelve years later one might expect from him. There is, of course, cross-dressing—but in a fun slant on such gender bending, it is unclear whether the female singers who play witches (as well as countertenor Dmitry Egorov as the Sorceress) are male or female; at least it was to me. I only discovered when they sang. And in that sense, there is some impression given that liberation from a claustrophobia that stands somewhat at odds, presumably on purpose, with our post-Virgilian idea of Carthage is through music, through dance, through human (and theatrical) activity. The loneliness felt in the case of Dido and Aeneas alone on the vast expanse of the bench comes as contrast, yet within an overall sense of constriction. It is perhaps a reinvention of the classical AMOR/ROMA dilemma, not without metatheatrical elements born of, yet far from enslaved by, the old English court masque. 

Bluebeard (Nicholas Brownlee) and Judith (Claudia Mahnke)

With Bluebeard, by contrast, where one would expect to see visual, if opulent constraint, within the castle, the stage is wide-open, though its tilting revolve, leading nowhere, provides necessary boundaries. The important thing here, I think, is that nothing is overladen with attempts, necessarily unsuccessful, to conjure visually the riches of what we hear. There is good reason this opera is often given in concert. Like Bieito, Kosky understands Bluebeard as a game of sado-masochism. It is played out with restraint, though certainly not without action, simply making every action, more symbolist than realist, count. And it is open, like the stage, permitting to make what one will. Doubles of different ages come and go, participate and do not; but it is clear where the drama truly lies. 

Benjamin Reiners registered the orchestral action most strongly in Bartók, seemingly afraid to trust Purcell at what we can still with good reason consider his word, notwithstanding the complexities of textual issues three centuries on. Leading the excellent Frankfurt Opern- und Museumsorchester, Reiners traced the ebb and flow of Bartók’s score with dramatic wisdom, absorbing the fascination of detail within longer-term hearing (and playing), not unlike what we saw played out above. If lacking the razor precision and strength of tonal association of the finest accounts, there was no reasonable room for complaint here, especially with Nicholas Brownless and Claudia Mahnke on stage. Their commanding, utterly involved performances seemingly took us to the limits, straining at something beyond, again just like Bartók’s (and Béla Balázs’s) drama. Within those limits, all manner of variegation made its point just as strongly. Bluebeard’s deep, damaged vulnerability came as powerfully to the fore as Judith’s complex death wish, caught within the dictates of fate. 

When it came to Purcell, Reiners (and, to a certain extent, the orchestra) seemed more uncertain, aping what we have come to know, rightly or wrongly, as ‘period style’ without making the case for it. The results often sounded arbitrary, more fashionable than grounded, resorting to peculiar distractions so as not to sound too archaeological and thereby emerging as neither fish nor fowl, not even an alchemical combination of both. I do not think I have ever, in any variety performance, heard the second section of the overture taken at anything like such a speed. One may quibble with the suggestion by the Victorian editor (and composer) George McFarren of ‘Allegro moderato’, though it seems sensible enough to me; a modern Presto merely sounded bizarre. Other sections came across as listless, lacking necessary underpinning of harmonic rhythm. Peculiar Luftpausen were frequently inserted into vocal lines, solo and choral; whether this were a feature of the production or simply the performance, I am not entirely sure, though I had a distinct impression, so well staged were they, that it may have been the former. At any rate, they served little musical—nor, for that matter, dramatic—purpose, though some will doubtless have felt differently. Likewise addition of recorder, oboe, and percussion. (The same people who scream blue murder at a great name from the past ‘taking liberties’ with early music seem strangely content with far more musically arbitrary practice such as this, so long as vibrato is minimised and/or ‘period instruments’ are employed.)

Dido (Cecilia Hall) and Aeneas (Sebastian Geyer)

A good deal, though, was redeemed by the singing. Cecilia Hall and Sebastian Geyer made for a captivating, ill-fated pair, who used Kosky’s staging (and Alan Barnes’s evidently attentive revival direction) as a fine springboard for their own thoughtful interpretations of mood, action, and overall trajectory. Kateryna Kasper’s Belinda, Karolina Bengtsson’s Second Woman, and Egorov’s aforementioned Sorceress, all impressed in detailed performances highly invested in music, words, and gesture. The chorus responded similarly well to demands both of score and production. Much, then, to enjoy—and on which to ponder.

Venus and Adonis/Dido and Aeneas, HGO, 20 May 2022

Cockpit Theatre


Venus – Elizabeth Green
Adonis – Conall O’Neill
Cupid – Ralph Thomas Williams
Shepherdess – Hannah Savignon-Smythe
Huntsman – Matthew Secombe
Shepherds – Garreth Romain, Angelo Fallaria, Fabian Tindale Geere

Dido – Katey Rylands
Aeneas – Sonny Fielding
Belinda – Julia Surette
Sorceress – Helena Cooke
Second Woman – Isabelle Haile
Witches – Olivia Carrell, Abbie Ward
Spirit – Hannah Savignon-Smythe
Sailor – Matthew Secombe

Jessica Dalton (director)
Kate Goldie Cheetham (choreography)

Tom Turner (lighting) 

HGOAntiqua Orchestra
Seb Gillot (conductor)

Images: Laurent Compagnon, @LaurentCphotos 
Dido and Aeneas

Two operas from the English dawn of the genre: a winning combination, if not so frequently encountered as one might expect. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is, of course, universally considered a landmark in the histories both of English music and of opera: ‘Tristan and Isolde in a pint pot’, as Raymond Leppard once called it (and I have probably quoted at least once too often). Blow’s Venus and Adonis, still earlier and more closely tied to the Stuart court masque tradition, will doubtless always be less popular; it has many of its own virtues, though, which arguably emerge all the more clearly when one has such opportunity not only to compare but also to contrast. 

HGO’s Venus, directed by Jessica Dalton, begins aptly enough in the office of a modern dating bureau, an obvious yet telling location for Cupid to initiate his Prologue proceedings, essentially a programme of instruction (as becomes more apparent still in the second of the three short acts). Shepherds and shepherdesses try out, consider, and swap partners—probably inconclusively. Then the action returns to more or less where it ‘should’ be: a mythological setting that is probably ancient, but really could be anywhere, suggesting a ‘universality; that will be part, though only part, of our consideration when answering the puzzling—and puzzlingly little asked—question as to why we are so interested in the art of the past at all, and how it comes to speak to us. Various second-act dances—perhaps more masque than opera, even by this work’s standards—are well choreographed and danced, such as might well have pleased the man who above all had to be pleased: Charles II. Often, less is more; here, something straightforward and stylish eminently fits the bill. 

Venus (Elizabeth Green), Adonis (Conall O'Neill), Cupid (Ralph Thomas Williams)

Questions of performance and meaning are complicated further, of course, by a performing art such as music, indeed perhaps especially so by music, more so than spoken drama, in which we can cling to the fiction—we hardly have an alternative—that our ‘instruments’ remain the same. We do so, to greater or lesser extents, when it comes to voices, but greater controversies issue with respect to other musical instruments. Today, again somewhat puzzlingly, opera appears to have decided upon a mixture of ‘period’ musical practices and more  ‘contemporary’, or at least ‘modern’, theatre. This is not really the place to question that; it is a complex question, and much is a matter of business too, as well as allied pragmatics. What we see and hear is generally said to work, and we (nearly) all want something that works rather than something that does not. Such questions and others, related, are nevertheless worth reminding ourselves of, though, at least from time to time; for surely history interests when it renders strange, as well as when it renders familiar, and these things are likely to change according to what is (and is not) more common practice.   

For Dido, we return to an office. I admit I had not at all gathered Dalton’s concept, prior to reading the programme. Apparently, the action takes place ‘in the halls of a modern political institution, something a little like the UN perhaps, or the EU’, and Dido is a political leader. I am afraid it all looked rather like a provincial sales office to me, perhaps having an ‘away day’. It is probably not worth retelling my misunderstanding beyond that, other than to say that the witches appear to be cleaners, understandably offended by the mess people had made, and that Dido eventually swallows some pills, no pyre in sight. I was clearly not on the right wavelength, yet in retrospect can see a degree of overall framing between the two works, the loneliness of online dating replicated in that of Dido’s suicide and the inability of others to see in time what had happened.   

Dido (Katey Rylands) and Aeneas (Sonny Fielding)

Musically, however, one could enjoy a parade of excellent, increasingly confident young singers, all of them worth our attention, providing a sense of company both in dramatic interaction and in their coming together (some of them) as small chorus in both operas. Elizabeth Green’s Venus and Conall O’Neill’s Adonis were both beautifully sung, with excellent attention to verbal as well as musical matters. Ralph Thomas Williams’s Cupid made for a lively and mischievous cat to set among the pigeons. Katey Rylands and Sonny Fielding offered a Dido and Aeneas who grew considerably within the small confines of Purcell’s operas, the former’s Lament deeply moving in the best of traditions, the latter’s dark tone nicely suggestive of wounded masculinity. Again, verbal and musical acuity were finely matched. A fine ‘supporting’ cast had no weak links; I shall mention Isabelle Haile and Matthew Secombe as singers who especially caught my ear. 

Using his own, specially prepared editions, Seb Gillot led a small ‘period’ band in performances that loved to dance, but also to engage in dramatically generative gradations of recitative, aria, and much that lies between (whether in more Italianate, French, or English styles), as well as in affective tonality (perhaps especially strong in Dido). In Dido, Gillot provides music for much of what has been lost, though not the mythological prologue. The additional music works well, and permits a fuller, speculative experience—as in that of, say, Benjamin Britten’s edition—of what might have been. There is imagination If I was initially surprised to hear an oboe in the Overture, my ears adjusted: so much so that there was at least one moment later on when I could have sworn I heard a wind instrument, only to look and see that a viola had tricked me. There is probably an unflattering name for such an aural condition, but here we should take it to indicated a committed performance whose small scale did not preclude greater and amply realised ambition. The darker harmonies of Dido were certainly present, portraying Venus intriguingly and productively as the more distant from us. Form, vividly apparent, helped accomplish this too. This may not always be the way I hear Purcell or Blow in my head, but it would be surprising if it were. I learned much from listening, which is all I can ask.

I shall be hearing—and seeing—Dido again next month in very different circumstances, as part of a double-bill with Bluebeard’s Castle, directed by Barrie Kosky. There is room for all, and I do not doubt that memories of this performance, as well as others, will frame and inform how I respond to that too. However unfashionable it may be to speak in such terms, Dido and Aeneas is an imperishable masterpiece; every encounter should be a joy. This, in its well-chosen context, was certainly that. As for my misunderstanding of the staging, I shall ascribe it to tiredness at the end of a long week.

Dido and Aeneas/The Lighthouse, Royal Academy Opera, 16 May 2013

Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Dido – Sarah Shorter

Belinda – Sónia Grané
Second Woman – Helen Bailey
Sorceress – Rozanna Madylus
First Witch – Tereza Gevorgyan
Second Witch – Irina Loskova
Spirit – Rosalind Coad
Aeneas – Samuel Pantcheff
Sailor – Ross Scanlon

Sandy, Officer 1 – Iain Milne

Blazes, Officer 2 – Samuel Queen
Arthur. Officer 3, Voice of the Cards – Andri Björn Róbertsson

John Ramster (director)

Jake Wiltshire (lighting)
Patrick Doyle (costumes)

Chorus

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Iain Ledingham, Lionel Friend (conductors)

 

Samuel Queen (Blazes), Andri Björn Róbertsson (Arthur) and Iain Milne (Sandy).
Pictures © Royal Academy of Music, May 2013

Not the most obvious of pairings, perhaps: Dido and Aeneas and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse. One can certainly find connections if one tries, as director John Ramster valiantly did in his director’s note, especially with respect to the role of Fate. And of course one can make connections between most things if so inclined, when placed together. This, however, seemed more like an evening of two halves.

 

The performance of The Lighthouse was spectacularly good, at least a match for the recent English Touring Opera production, and arguably still more theatrically gripping. (How fortunate we are to have had two stagings in close succession!) There was not a great deal in the way of scenery; much was done with Jake Wiltshire’s brilliant – at some points, literally so – lighting, by turns suggestive of the lighthouse itself, the red eyes of the Beast, and much more. Ramster and his colleagues engendered a terrifying sense of claustrophobia and whatever horror – production, like opera, leaves matters tantalisingly unclear – it is that actually takes place. The sheer hell of being cooped up together, the promise of release having clearly been frustrated more than once, is conveyed viscerally, more by the characters’ interaction than anything external, and thus all the more powerful for it.

 

For that, of course, the three singers should claim a great deal of credit. Andri Björn Róbertsson struck Calvinistic terror into the heart as the hypocritical fundamentalist, Sandy. From the moment of saying grace, his sonorous deep bass, combined with charismatic stage presence, had one thinking of a perverted (anti-)Christ figure. His physical excitement during Blazes’ song, offered attempted release in more than one sense. Samuel Queen and Iain Milne presented a nicely ambiguous Blazes and Sandy, quite as impressive as actors as singers. Lionel Friend’s direction of the Royal Academy Sinfonia was quite beyond reproach; after a lacklustre showing in the first half (about which, more below), the orchestra sounded rejuvenated: precise, sardonic, and at times overpowering. The knife-edge balance between fatalism and human agency on stage was replicated, indeed engendered, in the pit. Quite outstanding!

 

What a difference a conductor makes, for Iain Ledingham’s direction of the same orchestra in Dido and Aeneas had been disappointing. Adopting that strange practice of having modern strings simply eschew vibrato, as if that somehow were enough to qualify as an ‘authentic’ performance, whatever that might be, Ledingham set the tone for what was to follow in the Overture: listless, hard-driven, and with sonority redolent of a school orchestra. (It was certainly not in any sense the players’ fault, as The Lighthouse demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.) If only Friend had conducted both. Vocal performances were less impressive too, or rather they were in the title roles. After a shaky start, Sarah Shorter recovered well, but was so let down by Ledingham’s conducting that it was difficult to reach any proper judgement. Samuel Pantcheff sounded out of sorts as Aeneas; maybe he was under the weather. Not for the first time, though, Sónia Grané shone, this time as a mellifluous Belinda. Rozanna Madylus made for a nicely malign Sorceress, ably supported by weirdly snarling witches, Tereza Gevorgyan and Irina Loskova. Ross Scanlon almost threatened to steal the show as a wickedly camp Sailor.

 

Ramster’s staging of Purcell’s masterpiece presented a similar meeting between camp and stylisation, perhaps strongest in the choreographed dances. Maybe that match was an expression of his ideas concerning Fate; it would make a good deal of ‘Baroque’ sense on paper. However, I could not help but agree with my companion’s observation when, slightly ruing her inability to watch a Eurovision semi-final, she said that it was actually all to be seen here. Certainly the strange portrayal of the underwear-flashing witches did not seem so very distant from what one might have imagined unfolding in Malmö at the same time. Despite some fine offstage choral singing, I felt strangely unmoved by what should be one of the most tragic of all operatic final scenes. (‘Tristan und Isolde in a pint-pot’, was Raymond Leppard’s wonderful description of the opera.) No matter: it would have been worth travelling a long way for a performance such as we heard of The Lighthouse.

After Dido, English National Opera, 16 April 2009

Young Vic Theatre, London

Dido/Sorceress – Susan Bickley
Sailor/Stephen – Eyjólfur Eyjólfsson
Bass – James Gower
Aeneas - Adam Green
Helen (in the bedsit) – Amanda Hale
Second Witch/Jenny – Helen Jarmany
Nell (in the study) – Helena Lymbery
Dido’s Woman/Prologue soloist – Lina Markeby
Anna (in the kitchen) – Sandy McDade
Tenor – Eamonn Mulhall
Henry (in the study) – Dominic Rowan
First Witch – Madeleine Shaw

Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (designer)
Leo Warner (director of photography)
Philip Gladwell (lighting designer)
Gareth Fry, Carolyn Downing (sound designers)
Pia Furtado (assistant director)
Helena Lymber (artistic associate)

Members of the Orchestra of English National Opera (Janice Graham, Matthew Ward (violins), Amelie Roussel (viola), David Newby (violoncello), Reiko Ichise (viola da gamba), David Miller (lute/baroque guitar))
Christian Curnyn (harpsichord/conductor)

It would be all too easy to fall into the trap of reviewing After Dido as if it were a production of Dido and Aeneas. Such would be a mistake, not least since any reservations one might voice could then be written off as a consequence of having failed to understand the nature of the beast: an opera critic at sea in the world of contemporary theatre. What, then, is After Dido? It is described as ‘a live music and film performance inspired by Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’ and at its core, at least in one sense, stands a performance of Purcell’s masterpiece: ‘Tristan und Isolde in a pint pot,’ as Raymond Leppard so memorably once described it. However, Dido and Aeneas is not produced on stage; After Dido is. This tells, in the words of the publicity material, ‘three contemporary urban stories of grief, lost love, departure, and death,’ which unfold in self-contained locations on different sections of the Young Vic stage. But After Dido is also to be found in ‘the making of’ these stories.

This ‘making of’ is not really a story in itself, after the manner of, say, Ariadne auf Naxos, yet it acquires a dramatic thrust of its own, not least since it is with these ‘workings’ that the piece opens, in the prologue – Dido’s own Prologue is, of course missing – to a radio broadcast, in which we hear recorded snatches of other items of Purcell’s theatre music. There were times when I wondered whether viewing of the technicians, moving cameras, actors other than the ‘principal’ actors performing the close up shots and sound effects, and so on, was all a little too much to follow. That, however, may partly have been the point, or at least one of the points, in that each viewer therefore had to decide at any point whether to watch part of ‘the making of,’ the actor(s) on stage, the actor chosen at that moment for display on the screen above the stage, or the musicians – or indeed, to flit between them, or to try to watch more than one aspect at once. To witness, for instance, one of the ensemble – I cannot now remember which it was – being filmed moving a light bulb over a window, whilst seeing this cleverly projected as the passing of car headlights in another ensemble member’s flashback, whilst also watching that second member reacting to the ‘live’ broadcast of Dido and Aeneas upon the three hundred and fiftieth year anniversary, without even considering the possibility that one might be at least partly watching one of the other stage events, presents multiple possibilities for the viewer, guided though he may be by the decision concerning which aspect is being shown on film at that time. I purposely use the word ensemble, since the boundaries between singers, actors, and ‘stagehands’ are fluid. Susan Bickley, having a little break from singing Dido and the Sorceress, is seen washing up at one point. This does not seem gratuitous, since a true sense of theatrical ensemble is thereby achieved. Sadly, this does not include the musical players; perhaps this would simply have been too difficult to integrate, but it is a thought. The work of the entire production team is throughout of an extremely high standard, Leo Warner of Fifty Nine Productions Ltd, working again with Mitchell, as he did for her National Theatre productions of Waves and Attempts on Her Life. Little is said, only‘BBC’ radio announcements and a few punctuating ‘readings’, but then it appears nothing need be said. Perhaps we ordinarily rely too much upon the spoken word, when music and visual stimulus can provide so much.

The ‘stories’ themselves relate to loss of one sort or another, just as Dido itself does, although there is none of the anticipation that characterises the opera’s opening scene. The time scale could hardly have accommodated that, given that the stories operate in ‘real time’. We witness a lonely girl, Helen (Amanda Hale), in her bedsit, play with her derisory ‘meal’, wind blowing in and traffic passing outside her window, as she moves towards her overdose. Henry (Dominic Rowan) contemplates the breakdown of his relationship, made utterly apparent when joined later on by Nell (Helena Lymbery). Clearly, the sooner a decisive break is made the better. Most moving for me was Sandy McDade’s superlatively well acted Anna, dealing in her kitchen – and outside in the garden, thanks to typically virtuosic camera work – with a bereavement. At one time, we actually see her dancing, both on stage and on screen, with whomever it is she has lost, but her facial expressions, her trembling hands, her tears, are perhaps more telling still.

What of Dido itself? It would be remiss not to comment upon the musical performance at all. A string quartet and continuo group, directed from the harpsichord by Christian Curnyn, provide the ‘orchestra’. If there were times when I should have preferred a fuller, warmer sound, what we heard was by the same token rarely unduly abrasive, although it veered somewhat between different styles of Purcell interpretation, the violins sometimes sounding more like old ‘fiddles’, sometimes more like members of a Classical quartet. I could not always discern why this should be so, but it did not worry me unduly. Tempi were generally on the brisk side but were not unyielding, which is more important. Purcell’s dissonances have been more searing; there was plenty of dissonance on stage, however.

Susan Bickley was excellent in her dual role. Everyone who knows Dido will have a favourite artist or favoured artists in the title role; it is that kind of piece. I for one can never forget Dame Janet Baker and also retain a great fondness for Victoria de los Angeles. Bickley has her own ideas, proves ever musical and ever attentive to the text, and certainly penetrates to the nub of the drama, though I sometimes found her voice a little lacking in refulgence. By the same token, however, one might wonder whether her Lament was unduly undercut by the amplified ticking of an alarm clock; I know this is not a production of the opera as such, but it seemed a pity. As the Sorceress, she did not opt for the overt pantomime vocalisation of the unforgettable Monica Sinclair (on the Baker/Antony Lewis recording), but there was a differentiation of voice, a certain ‘old Englishness’ to the differentiated portrayal. Adam Green’s Aeneas was sometimes less than ideally focussed, but the rest of the musical ensemble was of a consistently high quality.

Part of the reason for ENO’s collaboration with the Young Vic is to reach a different audience from that which typically visits the Coliseum. This is definitely to be applauded and I can imagine that the name of Katie Mitchell will do no harm in attracting curious theatre goers, as opposed to opera fans. After Dido is an intriguing piece, which is certainly to be preferred to a stale and vain attempt at reconstruction. It is a pity that no one seems especially interested in a more radical take upon Handel’s operas, in this shared anniversary year. Musical virtues notwithstanding, their theatrical weaknesses are rather more glaring than any in Purcell’s miniature, if incomplete, tragedy, so a rescue bid would doubtless be appreciated by those of us without the coterie of the at least slightly fanatical. Still, that problem is no fault of this production, which may well prove one of the more notable contributions to the anniversary celebrations.