Tag Archives: Purcell

Orfeo ed Euridice, and Dido and Aeneas, Grange Festival, June 2023

Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas are in a sense mirror images of one another. The Gluck starts with a tragic death and ends happily, the Purcell is the reverse. Gluck’s opera, first performed in Vienna in 1762, had a great effect on what came later in Germany and was particularly influential …

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The Indian Queen, English National Opera, ENO, London Coliseum, February 2015

This opera, or rather semi-opera (entertainment combining acting, singing and dance), was not really complete when Purcell died in 1695. Though it had already been performed, the loss of the Company’s main dramaturge and many of its singers compromised the result. Not therefore in the state that the composer would wish, and rather than attempt …

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The Fairy Queen, Glyndebourne, July 2012

A  Midsummer Night’s Dream as Gesamtkunstwerk, with actors, singers, and dancers in Purcell’s remarkable semi-opera, is given here in an eclectic production by Jonathan Kent combining the seventeenth century with modern times — linked of course by the fairies. It all starts in a Restoration drawing room with a Restoration version of Shakespeare. His play within a …

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The Fairy Queen, English Touring Opera, ETO, Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music, October 2011

Purcell for the twenty first century — or perhaps the seventeenth, or the nineteenth — and it’s enormous fun. This semi-opera, based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a series of masques written by Purcell a century later in the early 1690s, and this production is based on the incarceration in a mental hospital of nineteenth …

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Dido and Aeneas by Purcell, and Acis and Galatea by Handel, Royal Opera, April 2009

Acis and Galatea is a beautiful work, musically speaking … composed as a pastoral serenata, which means it would be sung without elaborate staging, though the performers would probably have worn costumes … This staging by Wayne McGregor was frightfully elaborate, which I think detracted from the beauty of the work

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