Reviews

Dido & Aeneas/Aeneas in Hell (Cambridge)

Anne Morley-Priestman

Anglia Opera, now based in the Music & Performing Arts faculty on the Cambridge campus of Anglia Ruskin University, has manufactured an interesting double-bill for its first full-scale production since 2005. Then it was Britten’s Paul Bunyan]. This time around Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is married to a confection by Paul Griffiths using excerpts from Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid and lesser-known stage music by Purcell to create Aeneas in Hell.

The libretto for Dido was the work of hack playwright and poet Nahum Tate, now best remembered for rewriting Shakespeare to give King Lear a happy ending. One of the odd things about setting words to music is that mediocre poetry often works better than great verse. This applies here, where it’s not always easy to follow the action of Aeneas in Hell (even if you know your Virgil) as he braves the Underworld to afford funeral rites to his comrade Misenus and learn if his adventures will result in glory, of a kind.

In this sequel, the wraith of Dido (Marina Caragianni) is silent, as is Hugo Hymas’ Aeneas. There’s a great deal going on in Hades, not all of which is clarified by Simon Bell’s production, though John Clarke’s setting of translucent moveable obelisks supporting an array of projected images is effective.

Paul Jackson conducts a large chorus and some intelligent singing from the principals, notably Caragianni – intensely moving in “Ah! Belinda” and “When I am laid in earth” . Alexander Ledsham (Misenus), Theodora Burrows (Belinda), [Louise Byrom as the sorceress and Emily Bruce doubling the sailor in Dido and the Arcadian Bo-Peep singing “Nymphs and shepherds” to a distraught Aeneas are other performers to note.