Dido and Aeneas is one of the greatest seventeenth-century operas, much performed and recorded today, yet its origins are obscure (it was never performed in public in Purcell’s lifetime), and it has not come down to us in its original form. In this performance with an all-star cast, bringing our Purcell Project to a fitting end, we offer Dido as it might have been heard at its first performance, at Josias Priest’s girls’ school in Chelsea in 1688. This involves restoring dance music cut out when the opera was put on in London in the early eighteenth century, and allocating the role of the Sorceress to a bass as Purcell intended – at the time theatrical witches were conventionally portrayed by men in drag.

We preface Dido with an anthology of music written for Restoration plays, including Matthew Locke’s remarkable Masque of Orpheus from Settle’s tragedy The Empress of Morocco, John Eccles’s sensational mad song ‘I burn’, written for the great actress Anne Bracegirdle and sung for us by Helen Charlston, and a newly discovered theatre song by Henry Purcell.

Supported by the SVF Purcell Project Fund

TICKETS: £20 (reserved) & £15 (unreserved)
HALF-PRICE TO THOSE UNDER 30