Vergil called his epic poem THE AENEID, and it's all about how Aeneas the Trojan fled from his destroyed city, faced numerous dangers and ultimately landed in Latium to plant there the Roman race. One episode, in Book Four (of Twelve) is a brief stop in Carthage for a one-night stand (in a cave, during a storm) with Dido, the foundress of the city. The episode is fraught with nuance, since Rome would eventually destroy Carthage. Aeneas himself is pure legend, but Dido is based on a historical personage, the princess Elissa, who fled Phoenicia after the death of her father and went to North Africa to found Carthage.
Purcell called his opera DIDO AND AENEAS -- Dido first, because it's all about Dido, whose grief for her father is the starting point of the opera, and whose suicide is the end of it. This production, however, has a spoken prologue about Echo and Narcissus, which is quite funny, but hardly sets the tone for Dido's grief in the opening scene. The accompanying booklet tells something about it, but as long as there was fated to be a spoken prologue, it might as well have introduced this opera instead of some other one. In fact, a little something about where Aeneas came from wouldn't have been a bad idea, since his tragic past and portentous future are less well known to audiences today than in Purcell's time.
The children stomping about the stage both during the prologue and during the opera itself are cute for about a split second. Purcell probably thought, like everyone else of his time, that children should be seen and not heard. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians had a horrendous practice of child sacrifice, which the Hebrews and Romans considered abominable, but at the half-hour point of the production had there been a clip inserted of the temple of Moloch scene from the silent film CABIRIA, it might have provided some comic relief. Here the Queen herself is sacrificed, along with Purcell and his music, instead of the children.
Several times the children scream beautifully, reminding one of the Nibelungen in Das Rheingold. Where is Alberich when one needs him?
The children are not the only ones creating stage noises during all the orchestral portions. The adults do a moderate amount of stomping as well. Horror vacui is one thing, but the production seems to be characterized by horror musicae. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants are major exponents of baroque music, and Purcell is considered the greatest British composer of all time. So why the disrespect?
I cannot compare this with the other blu-ray production, which I have not seen. After my friend watched and I endured this blu-ray, we both watched with pleasure the SD-DVD of the film version with Maria Ewing. The level of singing is better on that one, and the acting more serious, and the costumes and scenery more appropriate. (Bare stage is the polar opposite of the baroque aesthetic.) The sorceress in that production is filled with bile and seems dangerous enough to cause real trouble; in this one, she is comic figure hardly competent to manage any scenarii of national importance, like the fall of Carthage or the rise of Rome. She has more in common with Wagner's Kundry than with Vergil's Juno.
One final complaint: one pays $30-$40 for only a little over sixty minutes of blu-ray here, counting the 23-minute interview. Even if this Dido had been superior to the original, the price-per-minute is pretty steep. A friend of mine won't buy a CD with fewer than 60 minutes of playing time. Purcell has a lot of other music, and William Christie has recorded a lot of it. The person who is drawn to DIDO AND AENEAS would no doubt have been enthused by the addition of some high-resolution audio recordings of other Purcell works, such as the wonderful early FANTAZIAS, or some of the theatrical music from other productions such as DIOCLESIAN. I hate to post negative reviews, but this package offers way less than half the material that can fit on a blu-ray, and what is there is way less than half what the material itself deserves.
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