I really enjoyed this, and rather wished I had booked to see it a second time, as there is a lot to take in in what feels like a very concentrated hour and 40 minutes or so. The basic story is a follow on from the familiar tale of Dido and Aeneas as told by Virgil, and enshrined in Purcell’s opera – the sequel comes from 50 lines of an Ovid poem where Dido’s sister Anna is found by Aeneas abandoned on the shores of his new kingdom. He takes her back home and his wife Lavinia becomes very jealous and wants to murder Anna – as events play out, the characters have to deal with memories that don’t conveniently disappear. The ghost of Dido returns to haunt Aeneas and warn her sister that Lavinia intends to murder her. Anna runs away and becomes a river goddess.
The set is simple, and I guess reflects the uncertainty about whether the performance was going to happen, and the losses involved in a socially distanced audience – a seated separated chorus took up much of the stage at the back right, and there was a raised bedroom / theatre to the left with a chaise longue. Three chairs were to the right for the ‘court’ scene. A bluish gauze curtain brought singers to the front of the stage and separated them from the chorus (it also functioned as the river). The curtain didn’t look great from up in the gallery, but probably looked better to others. lower down The set was otherwise black or grey.
Musically, according to the programme notes, it started as a concept of a play-within-a play. Errollyn Wallen’s score (she spans contemporary classical, jazz and rock in her output) would provide the prelude and the aftermath, and parts of the Purcell opera would be re-enacted in the middle. What the work ends up with is more of a reframing, and an expansion, of the Purcell and what seems at first to be quite distinct gradually seems more and more to be merging from one to the other seamlessly. The Wallen score is performed on period instruments, with the addition of some percussion (including drums) and a bass guitar. I liked her music a lot – there was some beautiful vocal writing, and I loved the bit where Anna’s turning into a river goddess was described. But some of the Purcell was reconceived too – thus it was Aeneas who sung the famous Lament rather than Dido, and ‘remember me’ gained new resonance in this context, as Aeneas increasingly feels despair about his life, and moves from the heroic to the introspective. Thus the whole opera becomes a reminder of how the past haunts the present and it also re-orients you to familiar music in new and different ways.
John Butt and the Dunedin Consort sounded great throughout. I thought Matthew Brook as Aeneas was excellent – a really sensitive performance (including falsetto in the Lament, which didn’t seem at all out of place – more an expression of vulnerability . Nardus Williams as Belinda was also good. Lavinia (Jessica Gillingwater) was a bit strained but her fury and anguish was well-captured. The Dido/Anna role had originally meant to be Idunnu Munch; she was indisposed and so her understudy, one of the chorus members, Isabelle Peters, took over. I thought she did well – I don’t know how much notice she had – but her voice sounded rather tight and small to my ears and didn’t really have the resonance and the depth you’d want for the role. I may be in a minority here – the ‘Guardian’ liked her performance, I note. The chorus sounded excellent, and they also provided two splendid witches.
The side-titles in the Buxton Opera House are a nuisance – they are far too small and I was squinting from the Gallery trying to read them. This is something they ought to be able to do better.
John's musical journey 