Long-Anticipated Return of Levine

October 4, 2010

Long-Anticipated Return of Levine with Hero-Status Terfel, Gorgeous Playing from BSO

by Susan Miron

Bryn Terfel and a lively James Levine (Josh Reynolds, AP Photo}

Concern about the health of Boston Symphony’s Music Director James Levine preceded both the BSO Gala Opening Night on Saturday, October 2, and his return five days earlier to the Metropolitan Opera for a much-anticipated production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. At both performances, Mr. Levine was greeted by the audience with a hero’s welcome. His fellow hero on stage at both the Met and the BSO was the great and much-loved Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who shared and earned standing ovations for all four pieces he sang.
At both performances Mr. Levine was greeted by the audiences with a hero’s welcome.  At Symphony Hall,  a  rather slimmer Mr. Levine walked carefully, unaided, onstage onto his podium, where he planted himself on his custom-made swivel chair for the duration of the concert.  Sitting, he conducted energetically, with much larger hand and arm gestures than before his last grueling back surgery; he  gratefully accepted the audience’s enthusiastic applause and repeated standing ovations. Rather than go offstage between pieces, Mr. Levine continued to sit, but no matter: the orchestra played wonderfully for him, and the audience, including many important BSO givers,  was simply thrilled to have him back in the hall.
The BSO audience was a polite one; they seem to take galas in their stride, wearing nice clothes, but nothing too flashy, not much jewelry. Last night at Symphony Hall was a glitz-free zone; one would never confuse this audience with an Opening Night crowd at the Met or the Philharmonic.
As part of the new Met production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, Mr. Terfel will be singing Wotan, the head god, husband of Fricka, father of innumerable children (though none by Fricka) including Brünhilde and her eight Valkyrie sisters, known best for their battle cry “Ho-jo-to-jo” and helmets with two hornlike protrusions. (At the Chicago Lyric Operas’s production of the Ring five years ago, plastic Valkyrie helmets were all the rage. By the third opera much of the audience arrived wearing them).
This BSO program opened with a exciting, beautifully paced and played Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, written, along with Tristan and Isolde, when Wagner took a long break from writing the “Ring.” Wagner’s overtures accomplish musically —in less than fifteen minutes — the essential content of a six-hour opera.
After the Meistersinger Overture, Bryn Terfel strode on the stage in a long back jacket and sang Hans Sachs’s Act II Monologue, which he had sung at Tanglewood in 2004. Mr. Terfel showed a much softer self in “Wotan’s Farewell,” mixing heartbreak and regret. This aria was preceded by the inimitable “Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, the second of the four “Ring” operas. The BSO played it brilliantly, but for those accustomed to hearing it with the actual Valkyries singing at crucial moments, it felt like music minus one, or eight to be precise.
The Magic Fire Music which followed Wotan’s Farewell was played gorgeously. The four harpists who had tried valiantly to be heard through the orchestra in the Meistersinger Overture enchanted here. Throughout the evening the winds — especially the English horn in The Flying Dutchman Overture — and the low brass deserve special praise. The printed program closed with the Dutchman’s Monologue (“Die Frist ist um”) from The Flying Dutchman, which let the audience see the Dutchman’s bitterly frustrated side. Terfel’s perfect enunciation and pitch, sense of drama, and heartbreaking high notes dramatically limned the Dutchman’s agony of having to roam the seas, never to find redemption.
Mr. Terfel’s Wotan’s Farewell” is one of the Ring’s most emotionally wrenching moments.  Wotan he is saying goodbye to his most beloved daughter Brünhilde before leaving her asleep on a rock surrounded by a magic fire. Mr. Terfel captured each of Wotan’s shifting emotions, his voice initially full of pathos and tenderness,  then soaring with ease over the orchestra with breathtaking power and beauty.
The audience, which gave Mr. Terfel another standing ovation, was rewarded with an unforgettable performance of Wagner’s “Evening Star,” accompanied mostly by BSO’s own new star, harpist Jessica Zhou. At this point in his career, Mr. Terfel can sing whatever, whenever, and with whomever he wants. The warm rapport he has with Mr. Levine was palpable. Mr. Terfel has recently attracted roles to suit his dark, brooding qualities. (He was the most poisonously pernicious Scarpia I can recall.)  Last year a Bryn Terfel CD was released with the great title “Bad Boys” featuring him as Mack the Knife, Mefistofele, Sportin’ Life from Porgy and Bess, Don Giovanni, and Sweeney Todd. Most music lovers would be happy to hear this incomparable singer do Good Guys or Bad Boys, classical or Broadway.  He’s got the voice and personality for all of them.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Not a Dull Moment From Camerata

November 1, 2010

Not a Dull Moment From Camerata

by Susan Miron

Anne Azema Conducts HUC and Camerata (Trobador photo)

“Vieni, Imeneo! Marriage & Music in the Italian Renaissance” on Sunday, October 31, was The Boston Camerata’s engaging season opener.  Conceived by its Music Director Emeritus Joel Cohen in 2008 and originally commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the program was divided into five sections and performed without intermission. This was my first time hearing Boston Camerata, and I was enchanted. It seemed that most of the large audience in Harvard’s Memorial Church were among the legions of devoted Camerata fans. I soon found out why they loved this group.
Three sackbuts announced the concert’s beginning from the balcony behind the audience, and from then on, there was not a dull moment. The concert’s first section was “Invocation to Hymen,” which I later found out was the god of marriage and of weddings in Greek mythology. (I wish I had known that!) Included here was Claudio Monteverdi’s (1567-1643) Viene Imeneo that implores Hymen to bring tranquil days to the lovers, “driving away the shadows of torment an despair.”
Before each section the charismatic Anne Azéma, artistic director, mezzo-soprano, and when needed, conductor, was a charming guide to music and its history.
Part II: “1423: A Wedding Invitation from Rimini” was mostly devoted to Guillaume Dufay’s (1400-1474) florid Réveillez-vous. Part III: “The Virgin Bride” began with a moving and beautifully sung Gregorian chant and included several texts from “Song of Songs.”
Camerata’s “Marriage and Music” was compelling for its inspired choice of music and texts, its constantly shifting personnel and sites from which the music was emanating. Rarely would two pieces use the same singers or players, although each time the three sackbuts — kinder, gentler trombones —played, I would have been happy to spend the whole afternoon hearing them. Steven Lundahl (who also played shawm and recorder), Mack Ramsey, and Brian Kay were that good.

Carol Lewis, Salomé Sandoval, Anne Azéma sing a wedding song by Dufay (Trobador photo)

The sixteen Choral Fellows of the Harvard University Choir directed by Edward Jones were first heard from a space off stage to the right singing Antoine Brumel’s (c. 1460-c. 1512)  Sicut lilium inter spinas (“As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters”). Anne Azema sang several songs with great charm, accompanied by gamba and lute, played by Salome Sandoval, who doubled as excellent soprano. Regrettably, the lute was overpowered by the gamba; it was audible only when coupled by the smaller vielle, both played expertly by Carol Lewis, or alone with a singer.
Azema explained how marriage “worked” in upper-class Renaissance Italy: the bride and groom simply are peons to a goal. The songs gathered here, she explained, were like snapshots of their worries and joys. “What we think of as romance wasn’t there.” The bride was kept away from the world, not to be seen. “She is to remain untouched,” whereas the groom “can go out and enjoy himself.”  The young bride’s prayer by Adrian Willaert (c.1490-1562) with three singers and three sackbuts beseeches that “you may protect us from calamity.”
For each piece, the Camerata singers and instrumentalists, and eventually the Harvard singers, appeared in different permutations, each with different sounds and even personalities.

ODJB Wows the Crowd (Camerata Photo)

Often they would surprise the audience with sounds coming from different places off stage. The songs, composed some five hundred years ago mainly in North Italy, felt fresh and beguiling. The longest section Epthalamium (VI) involved the wedding feast, which once again began with a Gregorian chant featuring the excellent tenor Daniel Hershey followed by a yet another wonderful Canzona for sackbuts and cornetto, who appear a few minutes later in a lovely piece by Thomas Campion (1567-1620).  A highlight of this closing section was the impassioned plea by the great Claudio Monteverdi Si, ch’io vorrei morire (“Yes, Love, I wish to die, now that I kiss the beautiful mouth of my heart’s desire”), hypnotically delivered by five singers.
The official program (pre-encore) was all about joy and having a good time; everyone in the Camerata and Harvard group gave an exuberant performance. We had already experienced and gotten to know the singers and players in small ensembles, so to experience them en masse felt festive indeed. A good time was had by all, on and off-stage.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Terrific Two-Piano Team at Longy

November 4, 2010

Terrific Two-Piano Team at Longy

by Susan Miron

Four gems from the four-hand two piano repertoire were given a stellar workout at Longy School of Music on November 2. The two excellent pianists, Philip Liston-Kraft and Daniel Weiser, appeared under the aegis of Classicopia, of which Weiser is Artistic Director. “Two Piano Power,” as they titled it, was their second concert in the Boston area in five days. The other, at the Goethe Institute last Friday, featured music for two pianists at one piano.
The biographies of the evening’s pianists are more interesting than most. Weiser, most recently on the piano faculty of Dartmouth College, had finished the first year at Harvard Law School (where he was a classmate of President Obama) when he headed off to Peabody Conservatory and got a Doctorate in Piano. Polymath would be an understatement for describing Kraft, who holds an M.D. degree from Tufts University Medical School, is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and teaches German at Dartmouth in the Accelerated Language Program. His day job is Senior Associate in the Research Ventures and Licensing Office at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also an accomplished ballroom dancer.
The two pianists met years ago after Weiser saw Liston-Kraft’s note (on the Longy bulletin board) looking for a pianist for a two-piano concert at Harvard Musical Association. Twenty years later they met up again at Dartmouth, where they played together and realized they had found the ideal piano partner.
Tuesday’s concert began with Suite No. 1, Op. 15 by Anton Arensky, known, if at all, for his piano trio. The ebullient Weiser enthusiastically imparted background details of the composers and pieces, in lieu of program notes. An important Russian composition teacher whose his pupils included Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, Arensky nearly met the fate predicted by his own teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov: “He will soon be forgotten.” Not so here. The Suite is a charmer, with a jazzy first movement, a second movement full of glitter and more jazziness, followed by a lovely Polonaise.
Variations on a theme by Beethoven, Op. 35 by Camille Saint-Saëns, is constructed quite differently than Arensky’s Suite, in which the two piano parts can stand alone, (and thus prove satisfying to practice alone). Saint-Saëns, the more accomplished composer, has each pianist answer the other, like matching puzzle pieces. The music’s lines bounce back and forth between the two pianos, entertaining to watch as well as hear. There is a ghoulish funeral march, suitable for the season, and the all-but-obligatory Saint-Saëns fugue.
Franz Liszt’s wildly popular Hungarian Rhapsody received a excellent performance following intermission. Weiser noted, “I’m not sure Liszt ever imagined its comic possibilities,” then recounted some of the more than dozen cartoons which used this piece, ranging from Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, and Woody Woodpecker to the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races. What fun! How could Lizst NOT have seen the comic possibilities?
The program ended with Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2, Op. 17, a four-movement work recognizable throughout as this composer’s. Written in 1901, after the Second Piano Concerto and Cello Sonata, it also has many moments which sound like Arensky, his teacher. The second (of four) lyrical and romantic movement would melt the heart of any audience, and this one was beguiled. Weiser and Liston-Kraft, a terrific two-piano team, were clearly meant to play together.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Magical, Believable Petrushka

November 13, 2010

Magical, Believable Petrushka

by Susan Miron

Puppeteer Basil Twist (Leroy Door photo)

Basil Twist, nine puppeteers, and twin Russian-born pianists, Irina and Julia Elkina, presented an enthralling Petrushka at the Paramount Theater on Nov. 11. (The show continues through Nov. 21.) Co-sponsored by ArtsEmerson and the Celebrity Series of Boston, this ingenious production, commissioned in 2001, was the brainchild of Twist, a third-generation award-winning puppeteer. He was inspired by the famed 1911 Ballet Russe production created by Michel Folkine and danced by Vaslav Nijinsky.
The pianists, who have played together since the age of five (we never do find out their ages), based their two-piano arrangement of  Petrushka on Stravinsky’s four-hand version from 1947 and Grigoriy Korchmar’s handwritten arrangement for three movements. (The program lists the pianist/composer’s last name incorrectly as “Krochmar.” For those unfamiliar with Korchmar, he was born in Baltiysk in 1947. Although little-known outside his native Russia, he is a prominent figure in the musical life of St. Petersburg. A piece of his was played at a faculty recital at Longy last spring.
The two grand pianos were on opposite sides of a ten-foot-square frame which acted as both an unexpected screen and the location for this magical Petrushka. As the performance is a mere thirty-five minutes long, the evening began with an apt opener, Stravinsky’s lovely three-movement Sonata for Two Pianos, with an abstract “fantasia of puppetry.” I have heard this piece played far more dramatically by Roberto Poli and Sergey Schepkin at Jordan Hall in 2002; However, it was hard  to get a good sense of the balance as critics were assigned seats at the sides and near-back of the hall. The surprising element was the appearance inside the darkened frame of seemingly free-floating geometrical images that danced around, reshaping themselves one color at a time — yellow, turquoise, red, purple, blue. It was quite mystifying until the performance segued into  ”Petrushka,” and we realized the puppeteers in black velvet moving the puppets had been behind the moving of the shapes. It served as a enchanting prelude.

Duet between the Ballerina and the Moor (Leroy Door photo)

The two Elkinas switched pianos for Petrushka: Suite for Two Pianos. It worked well and was well played. However, I actually prefer the virtuosic one-piano version to the sister’s new arrangement and still love the orchestral version with its myriad colors best of all. From the moment the scene opened at the Shrove-Tide Fair, the audience was spell-bound. The three puppets — the Moor, the Ballerina and Petrushka — are magical. They (especially Petrushka) actually convince us that they are living creatures with all the emotions and passions of humans. Each of the three puppets/marionettes is controlled by three people, and their range of motion is astonishing. Petrushka, who falls in love with the Ballerina, flies and flits about, doubles over, is pursued by a huge bear claw and fangs, is killed by the Moor, then comes back to life in, of all places, the audience’s left side. Petrushka’s spirit, however tragic, is unstoppable; we know to love him from the moment he appears.
The four-foot-high Ballerina, however, often steals the show. As bone-thin and leggy as many ballerinas wish they could be, the Ballerina seems, physically, very close to human. There would seem nothing — except to love Petrushka — that she can’t do. The puppetry here is absolutely astonishing; I have never seen anything approaching it, even in puppet-loving Prague.
Both Czech and Japanese puppetry influence this production. Bunraku, probably less well known to Western audiences, has a thousand-year-old Japanese heritage that has evolved over the years; the puppets, around three-and-a-half feet tall, now seem more real. Originally operated by one person, they now are cleverly designed to be operated by three puppeteers, visible although shrouded in black.
Twist worked closely with the two pianists and was guided, he writes, by Stravinsky’s music. “It inspired… every fantastic image in my head, and now on stage. In many cases my understanding of the music has led to different characterizations and narrative action than the original production.” I loved this production, but hearing “Petrushka” in its many piano versions always feels to me like hearing it in black and white, so to speak. The color here came from the three puppets, the light show, and the Twist trademark wavy curtains. As said, the performance was fifty-five minutes long; I could have watched Basil Twist’s puppets all night.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Sir Simon Rattle and Musicians Give Their All

December 6, 2010

Sir Simon Rattle and Musicians Give Their All

by Susan Miron

Jordan Hall was only partially full for one of the season’s most exciting concerts, “Concert for the Cure” on Sunday night, Dec. 5. Although the concert featured two superstars, conductor Sir Simon Rattle and pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, and had plenty of pre-concert press coverage, people might have stayed away because of the ticket prices ($100 and $150). The brainchild of flutist Julie Scolnik, who had breast cancer five years ago, this concert, presented by the Susan G. Komen organization, was meant “to raise funds and awareness in the fight against breast cancer.” Skolnick spoke eloquently about her time in the chemo chair, accompanied by music on her Ipod, which gave her hope through this ordeal.
If less than lucky in health, she was extremely lucky with her choice of friends, many of whom played in the orchestra. (Everyone involved, from Marc-André Hamelin to Sir Simon, volunteered their services). While subbing at BSO, she had befriended Sir Simon in the coffee room at Symphony Hall and renewed their friendship a few years later. When she mentioned her dream of this concert, he jumped at the opportunity to help out, but had only one day free, which was yesterday. For no fee, he drove up from NYC, conducted a three-hour rehearsal and a two-hour concert, then drove back for a 9:30 A.M. rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera Monday. Sir Simon is an unusually easy and expressive conductor to follow. Both before and after the concert, the players seemed ecstatic about the chance to work with him. It’s not often one sees so many seasoned players this elated. Sir Simon was the evening’s hero before he conducted a note.
The evening opened with one of Boston’s beloved new musicians, Marc-Andre Hamelin, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G major, K. 543, a favorite of Leonard Bernstein. There is, as those who know Mr. Hamelin’s playing and repertoire, nothing he cannot play brilliantly. For those who know him “merely” as a player of monstrously difficult repertoire, the surprise here was that he was a stellar player of Mozart — a model of clarity, intelligence, and beautiful scale work and voicing. It is always a privilege to hear this thoughtful pianist. Sir Simon, especially in the third movement with its catchy tunes and horn calls, seemed to be having a terrific time. It was a great collaboration.
Mahler’s gorgeous Adagietto from Symphony No. 5 for harp and strings has different meanings for many people. To harpists, it’s an audition piece; it is the heartbeat of the movement, and rhythmically tricky. Last night’s harpist, Boston Symphony’s Jessica Zhou, is another wonderful new musical citizen. She was placed towards the rear of the stage, but every note she played came through with poignancy and elegance. This was music for anyone’s Ipod, and aptly chosen for this program.
The Brahms Symphony No. 2 received a spectacular performance. The four horns, the BSO’s James Sommerville, Richard Sebring, Jason Snider and Eric Ruske, gave stunning performances. Sommerville’s solos were, as always, simply perfection. The trombones,  Stephen Lange (of the BSO), Ross Holcombe and Gabriel Langfur, were also excellent. (One wanted to know where the others usually played). The strings, especially the first violins,played beautifully, and BSO oboist John Ferillo was his customary superb self. Throughout the winds had impeccable intonation and the strings played with real beauty. For those who love Brahms 2, this was a performance not to be missed. I do not expect to hear a better one, ever.
Each of these pieces were played by pros or people about to be pros. I think the very rare opportunity to play for Sir Simon was surely an incentive to play unusually well. It seems unlikely he will soon be returning to the BSO, and this seemed extra sad given the response he elicited from these players. Conducting is far more than hand gestures and facial expressions and a good baton technique. The charismatic Sir Simon, whose conducting doesn’t draw attention to itself, had the orchestra produce breathtaking crescendos and playing of memorable musicianship. He produced amazing results, and his players certainly loved him last night. It was one of those concerts that both the too-small audience and the players will not soon, if ever, forget.
Besides the exorbitantly-priced tickets, there were a few things that could have been easily remedied. The “Concert for the Cure Orchestra” was filled with people from orchestras and chamber ensembles besides the BSO, and without adding a page to the program book, it would have been very helpful to know where many of these musicians play. Also, knowing (yesterday, for example) that attendance at this concert would be low, it would have been great to have made tickets available — to students, to anyone! — so that more than the center section would be filled. That so few people experienced this great concert is a real shame.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

 

Larget-Caplan Doing Everything Right

January 8, 2011

Larget-Caplan Doing Everything Right

by Susan Miron

Some thirty markedly enthused people gathered on Friday, January 7, at the small recital room at New School of Music in Cambridge to hear guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan in a program that mixed well known and unknown pieces and composers. Larget-Caplan is in the beginning stages of what promise to be a good career. He’s doing everything right — making interesting CDs, commissioning and performing both classical and Spanish and Latin American music, often with a dancer, and playing very well.
Dressed all in black with a red tie, Larget-Caplan opened his program with J.S. Bach’s Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-Flat Major, BWV 998, originally titled Compositionen für die Laute, in E flat. Written at the time of Bach’s lute suites, it was probably performed on a lute-harpsichord. The fugue is longer than the other two movements combined, and like most Bach fugues, presents traps that can be most disheartening. As many performers know, opening with Bach may be great for the audience, but is always better if one had already rid oneself of nerves. Larget-Caplan, who played it in D Major, got through it with grace.
From the Quatre Pièces Brèves by Frank Martin (1890-1974) on, Larget-Caplan seemed more at ease (who wouldn’t be after performing a Bach fugue?) and his playing immediately became far more interesting and colorful. The program notes explained that these four lovely pieces were written in 1933 for guitarist Andrés Segovia who refused to play it (another idol goes up in flames). Martin then re-scored it for piano, calling it Guitarre. Kevin Siegfried’s (b. 1969) “Tracing a Wheel on Water” was commissioned by Larget-Caplan in 2003 and has had spectacular and deserved success since then. According to the program notes, it has been performed in over 50 concerts and is the title of one of Larget-Caplan’s CDs. It’s a hypnotic work, what the composer says “is a meditation on my experiences of the water’s surface… a manner in which flowing circles on the water’s surface envelop one another in a rhythm that is always new, yet never changing.” This hypnotic and beautifully written work was, for me, the highlight of a really interesting concert.
Elegie für die guitarre by J.K. Mertz (1806-1856) was, in guitar terms, a long piece, about ten minutes. A piece of great charm, it was just the right thing for a nasty January evening. At least two heads in the audience were contentedly bobbing along the whole piece; people seemed to be entering a state of total relaxation.
If so, they were awakened in the most seductive manner with the ever-famous Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999), here performed with piano accompaniment. Do most people know him for any other piece? This is yet another piece Segovia refused to play, as he did not approve of the rasqueados (flamenco strumming) of the first movement.  I admit, I did not look forward to hearing this colorful orchestral accompaniment in a keyboard reduction, as piano and plucked strings (harp and guitar) need a pianistic wizard to get the balance right. Luckily, Larget-Caplan had a terrific pianist, Kai-Ching Chang, about whom I cannot rave enough. The two musicians played superbly together, so the two (first and second) movements they played were like the most exciting of chamber music pieces. Chang might not be well known in Boston, but as a collaborative pianist she cannot be beat. The Rodrigo was full of excitement and passion; I felt as if I were transported to Seville. I’d hear it again in a heartbeat.
I have a new way of scoring concerts. 1), Would I see the performer or group again? Absolutely. 2), Did I like the evening enough to shell out hard cash for a CD? Reader, I bought two.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

Fuse Classical Music Review: The BEMF's Impressive "Dido and Aeneas"

Classical Music, Featured, Music, Opera Add comments

Nov 282010

BEMF’s Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs have, once again, produced a work of impeccable and imaginative scholarship for a production that’s not only historically informed, but musically, dramatically, and visually entertaining.

Laura Pudwell performs the role of Dido in the BEMF's production of DIDO AND AENEAS. Photo: André Costantini

Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate. Presented by the Boston Early Music Festival. At New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA, through November 28.

By Susan Miron.
Henry Purcell’s (1659–1695) opera Dido and Aeneas has been so popular over the past 75 years that there have been nearly 50 commercial recordings. I grew up on the record featuring Dame Janet Baker—for me she is the perfect Dido. The record was about 50 minutes long.
Saturday night’s performance by the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) clocked in at about an hour longer with not a dull moment. The two co-directors of BEMF had added several pieces of Purcell’s music that fit in perfectly. This is the third chamber opera that the BEMF has produced since 2008; each has featured full costumes and elements of Baroque dance. Their 2009 production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea was a great success. And if the tumultuous applause at the end of last evening is any indication, the BEMF’s Dido and Aeneas falls in the same category.
The libretto by Nahum Tate is based on the story of Dido and Aeneas in the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. No one is really sure about early history of the work—much has disappeared. Only a libretto from an early performance survives. BEMF points out that “the earliest copies of the score come from at least 60 years after the work was composed, and lack the music for the original prologue as well as incidental music and dances indicated in the score.”
The first performance might—or might not have been—at a girls’ school in Chelsea, outside of London in the late 1680s.
BEMF’s Dido and Aeneas is the result of scrupulous scholarship and informed imaginative leaps. In a Boston Globe interview, BEMF’s co-director Stephen Stubbs admits that he sees this project “not only as a reconstruction but also as an attempt to jolt listeners out of their familiarity with a cherished favorite . . . If you think of it like a restorer of a painting, where there’s a corner missing, you can pretty much imagine what I did—try to make the corner feel as if it fits.”
One of the missing corners involves choosing music for the opening, which Stubbs found in one of Purcell’s many songs. Dance and movement are as integral to this performance as it was in the girls’ school in the 1680s that may have first produced this opera. Caroline Copeland and Carlos Fittante, the featured Baroque dancers, were particularly excellent. The many costumes—all recycled from other productions—were apt and often hilarious. The chamber ensemble, a string quartet and harpsichord, were led by the BEMF’s two co-directors, O’Dette and Stubbs, who were fabulous. O’Dette and Stubbs alternately strummed small, Baroque guitars and a very lengthy archlute and theorbo. Both renowned lutenists, they were the heart of the ensemble.

(l-r) Brenna Wells, Jason McStoots, José Lemos, and Carrie Henneman Shaw in BEMF's production of DIDO AND AENEAS. Photo: André Costantini

To create a more intimate atmosphere, a tapestry covers the back wall of Jordan Hall. As the program notes point out, Dido is less an opera than a “court masque, an exemplar of that unique blend of aural, visual, and intellectual spectacle that embodied the extravagantly self-reflexive ethos of the English court throughout the seventeenth century.”
Several singers were downright wonderful, but if there there were a prize for most entertaining, it would go to Jason McStoots, who, in his most memorable guise, wore a costume that featured a waist big enough to look like a table for two, out of which crept another person. McStoots, a tenor, sang exquisitely, as did Dido’s sister Belinda, played by an up and coming Baroque singer, Yulia Van Doren. The vocal ensemble, twenty people in all, sang with gusto.
For many people, Dido is all about Dido’s Lament, a.k.a. “When I am laid in earth,” one of the most wrenching arias in all of music. Here Dido, Queen of Carthage, realizes she has been abandoned her beloved, the Trojan hero Aeneas. As Dido sings this, one by one the other singers lower themselves to sitting positions, as if the whole world were collapsing around them—a brilliant idea.
This production’s Dido, Laura Pudwell, was, to my ears, disappointing, but to be fair she had some tough competition on CD. I have both Jesse Norman and particularly the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in my ears, and Pudwell’s singing, for me, lacks their evocation of raw despair, particularly when Dido sings out in her top register, “Remember me, but ah! forget my Fate!” then melts down to the floor. All the male singers, as well as Douglas Williams as Aeneas, are excellent.
BEMF’s O’Dette and Stubbs have, once again, produced a work of impeccable and imaginative scholarship for a production that’s not only historically informed, but musically, dramatically, and visually entertaining.