Dido and Aeneas
Saturday, May 21, 2022 at 7:30 pm *º | Sunday, May 22, 2022 at 2:30 pm
* followed by VIP Opening Night Dinner
º concert broadcast premiere date
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center For The Performing Arts
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Universal stories often revolve around impossible choices between love and duty, hatred and desire, will and destiny. The consequences of such turning points are both beautiful and tragic in opera especially.
The 2021/22 Ars Lyrica season concludes with a new production of the first masterpiece of English opera. Henry Purcell, early modern England’s greatest musical dramatist, infused his chosen texts with both beauty and pathos. His Dido and Aeneas is a miracle of operatic economy, with lively dancing, memorable choruses, and at its center a noble heroine who loves too well: her demise is both tragic and transcendent.
Featuring:
Nicholas Garza, Sorceress˚
The New York Baroque Dance Company
The Moores School Concert Chorale
Betsy Weber, choral preparation
Abigail Fischer, Dido
Mark Diamond, Aeneas
Alexandra Smither, Belinda
˚Ars Lyrica debut
Production team:
Shaun Heath, wardrobe, hair, and makeup
Julius Sanchez, stage manager
Morgan Brochu, assistant stage manager
Catherine Turocy, stage director & choreographer
Christina R. Giannelli, scenic and lighting design
Concert information
Watch and re-watch with a Replay Pass
The online concert broadcast of this performance is available to in-person subscribers, digital subscribers, and Digital Single Event and Replay Pass holders. The concert broadcast replay will be available all season long.
On the program
Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas
Run time
One hour, no intermission
Change of plans?
Subscribers can exchange their Ars Lyrica 2021/22 Zilkha Hall concert tickets for another 2021/22 Ars Lyrica Zilkha Hall concert or turn their tickets into a donation. Call 713-315-2525 (option 4) to exchange or donate Zilkha Hall tickets.
About the opera
Synopsis
Act I. Having vowed never again to marry, the widowed Dido, Queen of Carthage, keeps a morbid evening vigil in the cave where her husband is buried. And yet she is attracted to Aeneas, a Trojan prince recently shipwrecked in Carthage. She fears breaking her mourning vow—and worse, being abandoned if her affections are not returned. Dido’s courtiers, first among them her sister Belinda, nevertheless encourage her new romance and rejoice at the prospect of a royal union. Following Aeneas’s declaration of love, Dido assents to the match. The entire entourage then adjourns “to the hills and the vales…to the musical groves,” where the union will be officially consummated and fêted.
Act II. In the darkly comic opening “Cave Scene,” a Sorceress and her witches plot to ruin Dido. Fate hangs over the supposedly happy couple in the subsequent “Grove Scene.” Here Dido’s companions wistfully recall mythical figures of the hunt: Diana, goddess of the forest, and Acteon, the unfortunate hunter whose prying eyes got him turned into a stag and killed by his own men. The Sorceress puts an abrupt end to these courtly musings with a storm that chases everyone but Aeneas back “to town,” after which the former reappears disguised as Mercury and orders Aeneas to leave his beloved Dido and return to Troy. The act ends with the witches giddily celebrating their success.
Act III. Aeneas’s sailors bid farewell to their “nymphs on the shore” while the Sorceress and witches gloat over Dido’s now-certain doom. Encountering her lover one last time, the injured queen spurns his offer to stay and chooses a noble, if tragic, end: death from a broken heart. The opera ends with her iconic lament (“When I am laid in earth”) and a poignant chorus, which invites the cupids to “scatter roses on her tomb.”
On the staging and choreography
Of all the operas re-imagined for today’s audiences, performances of Dido and Aeneas may outnumber the rest. In addition to period instruments, our production employs period movement, dance, and staging. The costumes, however, are not what the audience would have seen in seventeenth-century England. Painters of this era such as Poussin, Bourdon and Lorain employed the classical style in ancient dress; but by contrast, typical opera costumes were still modeled after current fashions of Restoration England or the masquerade costumes of Inigo Jones, a popular theatrical designer of the previous age. Our production, which employs an ancient Roman look, features costumes from the stock of the New York Baroque Dance Company, many of which were designed by Marie Anne Chiment. The ancient garb reveals more of the body and its movements, especially in the dancing. We hope this nod to Antiquity brings our audience a deeper kinesthetic sympathy with the expression of the performers.
The choreography is based on English dances by contemporaneous choreographers whose works have come down to us through an abstract dance notation system developed at the court of Louis XIV. As adapted to Purcell’s music—which requires a rearrangement of dance phrases, creating canons and expanding beyond the single line in the dance score—the result is not the typical French use of space but rather a more expansive sailing through the air. The final dance is based on a minuet choreographed by Josiah Priest, the original choreographer of Dido and Aeneas. The character dances are my own creation in the Baroque style, following stage conventions of the time. The dancers of the New York Baroque Dance Company have been trained in Baroque ballet technique and in reading the period notation system, allowing them to more fully participate in the creative and interpretive process of this work. We are very pleased to be joining forces with Ars Lyrica Houston in bringing this masterpiece to life!
–Catherine Turocy, Stage Director and Choreographer
One Night Enjoy’d: Opening Night Dinner (sales closed)
May 21, 2022
following the performance
Diana American Grill at the Hobby Center
We invite you to join us for an opening night dinner following the opening performance of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Ars Lyrica has become a leader in the performance of early music through its acclaimed performances and recordings of a wide range of Baroque repertoire, and this event benefits Ars Lyrica Houston and its Baroque opera productions.
Under the artistic direction of Matthew Dirst, Ars Lyrica now offers a Baroque opera every other season. These theatrical spectacles offer full immersion in the world of 17th and 18th-century culture, with elaborate scenic design, virtuosic singing, stylized dances, colorful orchestras, and profoundly human stories. No other musical genre from this era has the same capacity to move, excite, and inspire audiences.
Join us at Diana American Grill at the Hobby Center for One Night Enjoy’d!
Single Ticket: $300
Pair of tickets: $500
Sales have closed for One Night Enjoy’d.
About the artists
˚ Ars Lyrica debut
Artist reviews
“With her dramatic tumble of red hair and cello-mellow voice, Ms. Fischer sings with a passionate restraint that has no equal in her generation. You didn’t want her to stop.”
- New York Times
“Soprano Alexandra Smither is Susanna, her sunny cloudless top and plain spun middle voice striking straight to the centre of our affections in a performance of immense clarity and intuition, high-spirited wit and charm.”
- Opera Going Toronto
“If there was a single standout, it was Nicholas Garza, his countertenor full and fluent, glowing on top, dispensed with the loveliest legato.”
- Dallas Morning News
“Turocy, whose New York Baroque Dance Company securely performed with courtly steps in the opera, enthrallingly brought the iconography of the genre into the present with elegant palace perspectives, colorful feathered helmets, glinting armament and halberd dancing…”
- Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung
