Purcell – Dido and Aeneas
St Mary’s Church, Haddington, 6/9/2025
I Fagiolini, Robert Hollingworth (conductor)
For my first concert in this year’s Lammermuir Festival, I was intrigued by the prospect of ‘Dido and Aeneas’, along with several shorter works by Purcell, performed by the famous I Fagiolini, directed by Robert Hollingworth. Purcell featured in my recent Edinburgh Fringe concert, and 30 years ago, I recorded ‘King Arthur’, ‘Dioclesian’ and ‘Timon of Athens’ on Deutsche Grammophon with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert, so I was interested to see how a modern ‘early music group’ would perform this wonderful music.
The magnificent St Mary’s Church in Haddington was completely sold out for this Saturday evening concert, and we arrived to the sounds of a tuning Chitarrone, taking me back to my performing years, and the memory of interminable minutes (it often seemed hours!) waiting for the theorbos and chitarrones to tune.
Robert Hollingworth introduced the concert with witty anecdotes and fascinating detail about Purcell, and soon the first half of the concert was underway. It consisted of a variety of arias, songs, and instrumental pieces extracted from the many original and later scores that Mr Hollingworth has searched in an attempt to find all the music that Purcell left us in his short life. He died at the age of 36, and much of his oeuvre was lost or badly copied. His genius had been detected, though, at a fairly early stage, and he died a famous man and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Highlights of the opening half for me were the Pavan of 4 parts, a homage to those earlier English composers who laid the foundation for Purcell’s genius to shine, and ‘Pluto arise’ from Circe, sung by Frederick Long, although it lay rather low for him. In general, the voices in the first half struggled to get over the orchestration. Playing under the central tower of St Mary’s, the voices tend to drift upwards rather than outwards, and unless they have really good projection, we lose quite a lot of sound and nearly all of the words. As many of the arias in this part of the programme were chosen by Robert Hollingworth due to their expanding of a melody over a ground bass, it was a shame that we heard rather more of the bass and less of the melody.
Fortunately, a rearrangement of the players for the semi-staging of Dido, and the presence of singers with more projection in their roles, made the second half much more satisfactory from an aural point of view. Frederick Long as Aeneas sang in a better part of his voice as a high baritone, Rowan Pierce as Belinda seemed much more comfortable, and Julia Doyle as Dido was simply magnificent.
The simple staging in modern dress was highly effective, and the tragic tale of Dido and Aeneas played out very tellingly. The comic/scary scenes with the Sorceress and her witches were well done, and the comic scene with sailors, complete with an adaptation of the famous ‘fish-slapping dance’ from Monty Python, was hilarious.
The interaction between Dido and Aeneas was nicely played. There’s not a lot of music for the characters to establish themselves, and Mr Hollingworth did Aeneas a favour by incorporating a song from ‘The Yorkshire Feast Song’ into his part. Written for the annual visitation of the Yorkshire nobility to London, there are suitable songs for various situations, and the one used by Aeneas fitted subtly into the usual score. Mr Long and Ms Doyle managed to establish a clear relationship within the minimal music, and one felt slightly sorry for poor Aeneas as he was peremptorily dismissed by the Carthaginian queen, having been duped by the Sorceress to leave her court.
This, of course, leaves the story open for Dido’s great lament, ‘When I am laid in Earth’, one of the truly great moments in opera. Mercifully played straight by Julia Doyle, we were all kept enthralled by the simplicity of this grand lament, with beautifully poised singing and tasteful accompaniment.
This was a very fine performance, much appreciated by the full house. I have a couple of tiny caveats about the programme. The cast was named for Dido, but we had no clear idea of who sang the various arias in the first half. Perhaps the addition of the singers’ initials would have sufficed?
There was a very interesting two page essay about ‘Dido and Aeneas’ in the programme, but no synopsis, and I heard several members of the audience at the end who were trying to work out the plot, with little success. It’s a very minimal plot, but one needs to know what’s going on, especially when you play the witch scenes for laughs.
However, I don’t want to end on a downer, and I must reiterate that this was a very fine concert, with music making of a high standard, another triumph for the Lammermuir Festival.
Photo credit: Louise O’Dwyer
