Michael Tanner

Purcell puzzle

After Dido<br /> Young Vic Il trovatore<br /> Royal Opera House

issue 25 April 2009

After Dido
Young Vic

Il trovatore
Royal Opera House

For the third collaboration between ENO and the Young Vic Katie Mitchell and her team ‘direct a new work using multi-media techniques to create a synergy of music, theatre and film, inspired by, and incorporating, the full score of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’. Fortunately, the performance of Dido is a very good one, superior in crucial respects to the recent Royal Opera’s effort. Christian Curnyn, who conducts from the keyboard, is flexible in tempi and phrasing, so the tiny opera proceeds with a convincing naturalness, and the singers, discreetly miked, are uniformly excellent. Susan Bickley, doubling as Dido and the Sorceress, doesn’t have a large or glamorous voice, and can be a bit short-winded, but she still manages to create a regal effect through purely vocal means. And the Aeneas, Adam Green, has a rich voice which does what can be done to make this wooden part a little more sympathetic.

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