Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, Z. 626

Dido and Aeneas has been described, with good cause, as “the only flawless operatic tragedy ever written”. Maxim Emelyanychev’s interpretation references the spectacular style of theatrical entertainment favoured in Henry Purcell’s London to compelling effect. His dramatic vision of the work, foreshadowed in the Overture by a bass line underpinned by two thunderous violones, intensifies the work’s all-too-human drama. While he ratchets up the despair that begins with Dido’s premonition that her love for Aeneas is doomed, and ends in her rejection and death from a broken heart, he also revels in the boisterous rhythms of the show’s dance numbers, its many fleeting changes of mood and moments of delicious entertainment. Joyce DiDonato, who sings the role of Dido, agrees. “I loved doing this with Maxim because he’s my kind of collaborator,” the US mezzo-soprano tells Apple Music Classical. “He brings so much integrity to the standard of historical performance practice, yet he lives so freely in the moment. And he’s not trying to reproduce the ‘correct’ version. He brings Dido into the 21st century, blood and guts and alive and improvised and spontaneous. And I felt that all the time on stage with him. He makes it comes alive for audiences today. But this Dido and Aeneas comes to full-blooded life thanks in equal part to DiDonato’s majestic performance as the Queen of Carthage, by turns tormented, lovestruck, imperious, raging, resigned to fate, abandoned, crushed. She owns the vocal armoury and profound psychological insights needed to express the heart-melting confession, “Peace and I are strangers grown”, done with a whisper in her first aria, to explode with blistering scorn when breaking with Aeneas, and unfold an unforgettable lament in “When I am laid in earth”. DiDonato’s Dido is every inch the monarch, superior in rank to the Trojan prince who sails into her realm yet rendered utterly powerless by her overwhelming love for him. “Purcell presents Dido above all as a woman,” says DiDonato. “We see the woman first—someone who has to assume and perform the duties of a queen. And so her emotional landscape is under the restraints of royalty. But he introduces us to her as a woman, and I think that’s so important. When we get to the end of the opera, and she sings, ‘Remember me’, we see her as a friend, as a woman, as a lover, as a human being, not as a queen. She's not asking to be remembered in a legacy kind of way. It’s ‘remember me’, not ‘remember my title’. For me, that has always been key for this character.” Performing and recording the role of Didon in Berlioz’s epic five-act opera Les Troyens provided DiDonato with invaluable insights into Dido’s character that she carried into her interpretation of Purcell’s more concise telling of the queen’s story. “Coming to Purcell’s score for the first time, I already knew her, I knew all of the flesh and the muscles and the ligatures around her. I loved the economy of Purcell’s composition, I loved the specificity of it. But I think I was more successful this first time out in the role because I had the entirety of Berlioz in mind. I think the genius of Dido and Aeneas is that it’s funny, it’s engaging, it’s a little bit camp, it has everything. When Purcell clears the way for Dido’s first statement, you immediately know who she is and have the sense of where this tale is going. There’s that brief moment of light with her and Aeneas, and then everything just crashes. The economy of how you have to navigate the music is so pure, and it works so strongly because of everything that he surrounds her part with.” The luxury casting of Michael Spyres as Aeneas, the warrior destined by the gods to found Rome, adds credence to the queen’s infatuation; likewise, Fatma Said brings a rare expressive depth to the part of Belinda, Dido’s consoling confidante. Beth Taylor’s searing Sorceress and Hugh Cutting’s Spirit enliven the opera’s supernatural business, while Laurence Kilsby launches the sailors’ chorus with a contrasting dose of high-camp humour. The period instruments and choristers of Il Pomo d’Oro, marshalled with consummate flair by Emelyanychev, combine to bring a dazzling array of colours and characters to a tale that takes less than an hour to tell.