Leave your vibrato at home. Ashley Solomon's period ensemble Florilegium present the centrepiece of this year's Bath Festival - a #steamy# production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in the city's Roman Baths.
Tickets for the standing-only shows on 29 and 30 May are £30 each and include a glass of Prosecco.
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Dido & Aeneas - Les Arts Florissants / Christie Barbican, 10 October 2009
The blonde with the bulging biceps may look like a former DDR swim champ, but actually she is Malena Ernman, Sweden's Eurovision princess (yus really!) and Queen of Carthage for one night at the Barbican.
She won't be taking Sarah Connolly's crown any time soon though. Her Dido, in fact the show as a whole, was too tongue-in-cheek for that. But the semi-staged semi-spectacular, mimed out in evening dress with the mini-orchestra behind, sweetly hit a spot due south of pious reverence without ever getting too silly.
This was an adaptation of a fully staged version that William Christie and his Arts Florissants have been touting around Europe. Practice has made perfect. The remarkable chorus were precise and expressive despite being out of conducting view - proof that a clear beat is not everything. And their immaculate yet not over-clipped diction (even more impressive considering most of them are Frenchies) would put British choruses to shame.
In contrast to the Royal Opera House's patchy recent offering, there were no weak links in the cast. Even the token bloke, Luca Pisaroni as Aeneas, made the most of his none too ingratiating part. Judith Van Wanroij was a charmingly spirited and pure-voiced Belinda, and Hilary Summers' shockingly deep, dark voice compensated for an oversized helping of ham as the Sorceress.
Best of all was the musical accompaniment. Full of surprising little touches, like a solo guitar and a birdsong chorus (from the human chorus), it never slipped back into routine.
A small complaint - charging normal full price for barely an hour of music was I thought a bit cheeky (and by the way - though some bloggers were offered free tickets to the show and rehearsal, I was not one of them. All complimenti herein are made entirely at my own expense).
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Dido and Aeneas / Acis and Galatea - Royal Opera House, 31 March 2009
It was uncharacteristically brave of the Royal Opera House to unleash a choreographer (Wayne McGregor) and the forces of the Royal Ballet on a pair of operas, but it turned out to be a surprisingly successful experiment.
Perhaps not so brave, actually - his Dido and Aeneas had already aired at La Scala. It was the less bold of the two, conventionally staged against a minimal, monumental set, with precisely-drilled dancers doing little more than filling in the gaps between the singing. That it never really got up any steam dramatically is a problem lying partly with Purcell's now fragmentary score, much of which has been lost over the centuries. But the dancing, which could have been used to paste the scraps together, instead seemed to emphasise the disjunctions.
But there was some fine singing, especially from Sarah Connolly as the tragic Queen Dido and Lucy Crowe as her spirited maid Belinda. Iestyn Davies made an impressive Covent Garden debut too, singing sweetly from above through the hole in the roof. Eri Nakamura and Pumeza Matshikiza made a striking pair of conjoined-twin witches - a coup de théâtre that unfortunatly served mostly to emphasise the dry formalism of all around it.
The way Christopher Hogwood and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment fleshed out the score emphasised the sheer originality in Purcell's writing.
Tunes were more to the fore in Acis and Galatea - which includes some of his best ones, like Love in her eyes sits playing, Love sounds th’alarm and the charmingly silly Happy we!
The simple pastoral nymph-meets-shepherd tale was garnished with stuffed sheep and tangled branches, and some all-too-rustic singing as well. The title roles grated under the foghorn tenor of Charles Workman and Danielle de Niese's unwieldy vibrato. Matthew Rose as Polyphemus and Paul Agnew as Damon coped with Handel's demands far more gracefully.
But why couldn't the ROH use British singers for the principal roles too? - it's not as if they're thin on the ground. Kate Royal not only sings ten times better than de Niese, she's an accomplished dancer too - and the list of great English tenors, starting with John Mark Ainsley and Mark Padmore, just goes on and on.
Perhaps it was just as well that the dance element was more prominent in this half of the evening. Each singing role, including the chorus, had a dancing double, a soul perhaps, expressing the feeling behind the words. Dancing Acis and Galatea (Ed Watson and Lauren Cuthbertson) entwined in sinuous and utterly entrancing pas-de-deux. Behind the lumbering Polypheme was his exquisitely graceful alter-ego Eric Underwood. The dancers' nudey body stockings - part alien, part newborn - emphasised both their vulnerability and their other-worldliness.
It was all too easy to forget this was an opera and concentrate on the movement - more fluid and literally expressive than McGregor's other work, but stamped with his trademark quirky articulations. It was certainly more compelling than the curiously static singers and their fugly costumes (drag-queen Heidi for de Niese, shaggy tramp for Workman). De Niese did at least redeem herself in a beautifully-executed closing dance with Ed Watson, an emphatic reminder that this production is at heart a dance piece with singing tacked on.
~~~~~~~~~Click below for lots more photos~~~~~~~~~
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