One can always rely on Pacific MusicWorks to give Baroque music performances which are as close as possible to the way they would have originally been done, and the singers and musicians it assembled to perform Purcell’s only opera Dido and Aeneas the end of April did just that, though it presented the opera in concert form without staging and only minimal acting.
Dido has been immensely popular for a couple of centuries, but the only musical sources appear to be incomplete, so the opera is short and missing various elements which would have been natural to an opera of that day, the late 1680s. To round out the concert, given Saturday at Nordstrom Recital Hall, artistic director Stephen Stubbs chose to add as both Prologue and Epilogue another work by Purcell, “Why are all the muses mute?” an official Welcome Song to King James II who ascended the British throne in 1685.
Stubbs divided the work into two halves to bracket Dido. He also added, as orchestral interludes between parts of Dido, two works by Francesco Corbetta, a famous guitarist who might well have done the same for the original performances. Pacific MusicWorks put these different but well-chosen elements together seamlessly, though the whole performance might have hung together better had the Welcome Song taken up the first half of the program rather than splitting it.
Sadly, there was far too little information in the program to inform the audience what was happening. From the start, there was no indication that the Welcome Song to the King was in 23 sections and composed for a variety of soloists plus several orchestral interludes, the whole lasting around 25 minutes. People who did not know the music to Dido were understandably bewildered as to when the opera actually began.
Even though the libretto for Dido is in English and the acoustics at Nordstrom conducive to the spoken word, it was most of the time difficult to understand the words bring sung and, absent staging, to know what was going on, despite appropriate gestures from singers. Supertitles would have been a big help, or even the libretto added to the program, as well as a detailed order of program, rather than merely a brief synopsis of the plot. All that was audible of the Welcome Song is that it included the name Caesar frequently.
All of this detracted from the undeniably fine singing and playing. Mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell made a stately but anguished Dido, while tenor Brendan Tuohy made a good case for the loverlike but ultimately gullible Aeneas. Soprano Holly Boaz gave as much character as she could to Dido’s handmaiden Belinda, while mezzo Julia Benzinger was a thoroughly menacing sorceress, her two attendant witches, Boaz again and Brenna Wells, changing their voices to scratchy and mean.
While the main plot is centered on Dido and her doomed loved for Aeneas, Purcell adds amusing interludes, one being the witches and their chortling laughing song with the chorus of UW Chamber Singers trained by Geoffrey Boers. When the witches’ plot succeeds and Aeneas is forced to leave, one of his sailors, a very drunken tenor Ross Hauck, staggers on stage and, in the only really audible words of the entire performance, sings to his mates to love ’em and leave ’em. His wild gestures had the audience holding breath lest he stagger into Maxine Eilander’s harp. (He didn’t, just.)
All these singers are steeped in baroque performance practice, and all have big voices which matched well, including the young counter-tenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski singing the witches’ messenger and Catherine Webster as another handmaiden to Dido. In the last superb aria Purcell gives to Dido, “When I am laid in earth,” Pudwell gave it breathtaking emotional expression, jarred only by slight pitch wobbliness on the two high notes.
