The Academy of Ancient Music has been working through Purcell’s operas, semi-staged, one a year: The Fairy Queen in 2016 and, last year, a post-Brexit take on King Arthur. Those two works bring their own, perennial problems regarding editing and interpretation; in contrast, Dido and Aeneas, about 330 years old, works just fine the way it has come down to us. But challenges remain: how to avoid presenting just another tired old Dido? And what to put with this hour-long opera to make a whole evening’s entertainment?
The answer here, as suggested by the AAM’s Richard Egarr and realised by stage director Thomas Guthrie, was to extend the drama, preceding the opera with an imagined funeral for the queen – complete with returning, repentant, un-Virgilian Aeneas – set to a Purcell medley. The opera itself thus became a flashback, and in this, every singer on stage was holding and giving voice to a puppet or mask. The slender white corpse on the funeral bier in the first half was the puppet Dido, waiting to be reanimated so her story could be told.
That the story had such impact was thanks largely to the AAM’s spirited playing under Egarr’s driven direction, but also to the way in which the puppets simultaneously distanced and universalised the story, their faces marmoreal, their limbs expressive, their voices compelling. The singers included Rowan Pierce sounding crystalline as Belinda, Ashley Riches as Aeneas and, best of all, Caitlin Hulcup, mellow and then anguished as Dido. Her tragedy was bleak; but the rest was less reverent – Guthrie’s freewheeling work with the early-music-in-the-alehouse group Barokksolistene showed in the scenes for the witches and especially the sailors, who hurtled in through the auditorium yelling at Aeneas to “go on, my son”.
The “funeral” included aptly chosen songs plus some instrumental works that, with their repeating bass and wrenching harmonies, presaged Dido’s lament; Bojan Cicic and Rebecca Livermore wove the solo violin lines together beautifully. It may not have had quite the desired effect of putting the opera into a new context, but it certainly sharpened our focus on its tragedy.
