Dreamlike Scenes of Queenly Consciousness: Joyce DiDonato's Dido at Barbican Centre
Exquisite executions made contrasting deaths cathartic rapture at the hands of the insuperable mezzo and the Pomo D’oro Orchestra.
Photo credit: Mark Allan/Barbican Centre
Stilling opera’s oft-instinctive misbehaviour, Baroque inoculations soothe the overcultured ear; appearing reverential sometimes to the point of somnolence. A doleful dirge is never ridden on rubato; bars of treacherous coloratura trap the confident experimenter. Dulcet tones diminish imminent expulsions.
It’s a roaring misconception that suppresses sentiment in singers; ringing false alarms about a hazard of infringing Handel or Purcell with excess feeling – as if man’s anatomy were simpler then; and Shakespeare hadn’t limned the singe of ire. It’s teenagers’ belief in knowing more than older generations; an excuse to nix complexity.
Primed to complete this feat, Maxim Emelyanychev’s ensemble Il Pomo D’oro imposed polish on a choir of imperforable perfection. Entrances were trance-like in their timing; channelling sublime diminuendi of an almost startling dominance. In its spine-tingling midst the Barbican became the hallowed halls of a cathedral; alternating between jubilant and daunting across two contrasting tales: Giacomo Carissimi’s biblical Jephte and Purcell’s Virgil-inspired Dido and Aeneas.
Rarely has a concert rendering engaged all singers and its audience with such uncanny similarity to the (desired) opera stage. Incarnating the role of Jephte’s daughter – destined by her father’s flawed accord with God to die – soprano Carlotta Colombo embroidered her coloratura with ease and the touches of crisply honed consonants. In the lament ‘Plorate, filii Israel’ (‘Weep, children of Israel’) the performer moulded her vibrato to reflect a poignant youth suspended. Later in Dido and Aeneas she accomplished perfect synchronicity in her duet with Fatma Said’s Belinda.
Trills on strings pulsed sliplessly across the Latin oratorio’s scales and ornaments but tenor Andrew Staples – forced to sacrifice his kin to win a fight against foe Ammonites – didn’t always emerge flawless. Lower notes confronted the temptation to be put to sleep in the dual facet of his antihero Jephte: noble warrior and woeful father. In his duet with Colombo, ‘Heu mihi! filia mea’ (‘Alas! My daughter!’) certain off-pitch notes – especially in ‘filia unigenita’ (‘my only daughter’) came at pathos’s expense. Diminuendo offered nuance in his mourning over the young woman’s maidenhood (‘plange virginitatem tuam’). But the tonal polar opposites of choral sections mirroring each other captured listeners’ attention most.
Tempests pressed on in the prologue of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas: a prescient symbol of the three enchantresses’ complotted storm. Admitting audience members to the Carthaginian palace, Fatma Said delivered densely clustered quavers with an expert urgency; igniting with the strings’ hypnotic tremolos a sense of zealous doom. Said’s embodiment of Dido’s desperate maid Belinda made use of the singer’s sometimes bell-like texture to alert her queen to danger; so much so that ‘Shake the cloud from off your brow; Fate your wishes does allow’ exuded chary sanguineness. The portrait leant into the music’s ominousness rather than exemplifying Virgil’s colourless composite (The Aeneid’s Anna) – making for a striking contrast to her co-star, the delectable Joyce DiDonato.
A static pose declared her desolation. From the first bars of the score the mezzo carried herself like a damaged queen; evolving gradually a tantalising preview of bel canto mad scenes. Where Donizetti’s Anna Bolena scarcely has a chance to come across as regal in the master’s cabaletta- and cadenza-ridden music, DiDonato’s Dido ushered us into a stately differing reality. Composure poured into her notes but never swayed their ache; awakening restrained shock at Aeneas’ betrayal.
Tempting the perceived old-fashionedness of Purcell’s score with her signature near-pitch-bends (such as the one on ‘grown’ in ‘Peace and I are strangers grown’, DiDonato decked Dido in elegant languor. A diminuendo as precise as a violinist’s slow-to-thin vibrato slimmed her voice one moment; curling fingers travelled to her heart in stunned nonplussedness the next. Confined to her impending peril, Dido lived the opera in a world divided from her enemies and allies.
Solemn sovereignty bade her spectators to behold her death. ‘When I am laid in earth’ wrapped the long vowel of ‘wrongs’ in obstinate transfixion before twisting ‘get’ in the command ‘forget my fate’ into a mournful trill. Dido died removed from queenliness in her wracked psyche – yet a monarch still in her comportment.
Severing her last chance for serenity, Aeneas offered little introspection in response. Andrew Staples’ tenor painted fine coloratura on ‘some pity on your lover take’ as he pled needlessly with Dido in the first act but the warrior’s agency seemed limited. When Aeneas adamantly swore, ‘In spite of Jove’s command I’ll stay, offend the gods and love obey,’ determination was amiss. Distinguishing resolve in Staples’ characterisation sometimes proved a challenge.
Eruptions’ simmers writhed as mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor’s Sorceress wrested with rage on the stage. Possessed with a generous richness of timbre inclined to colossal contralto crescendi, Taylor’s voice could conquer any feat of tessitura but occasionally overdid it. Scheming to drive Dido to her suicide, the Sorceress called on her co-conspirators with ‘Wayward sisters, you that fright the lonely traveller by night;’ enlarging vowels with extra-loud enunciation in the process. Although the tonal clarity was never sacrificed, at times pitch ceded to a more parlando, late 19th-century interpretation of the piece.
Hugh Cutting’s Spirit – sent by the Sorceress to summon, in the guise of Mercury, the demigod Aeneas back to warrior duties – rounded ‘o’s’ in ‘hours’ and ‘powers’ and ‘shore’ and ‘restore’ with the poltergeist-like symmetry of a trained ghoul; creating an arresting horror with his limber countertenor. In their exuberantly cruel trio with the Sorceress both Alena Dantcheva and Anna Pirolli inspired bloodthirsty staccati to exemplify a coven.
Extracting exultation from his choir, maestro Emelyanychev spun moments often left to be parentheses into conceptual vignettes. The sailors’ dance – complete with bottles offered to unplaying players – clanged to proclaim a noisy (and yet technically perfect) paradox beside the taciturn-in-turmoil Dido. As a token of respect after her death the chorus members slowly rose at different times to bid farewell and order Cupids to ‘come scatter roses on her tomb.’
Slickly synching voice and movement, the performers ceded to melodious otherworldliness; endowing Baroque opera with the gift of realism to revive it for the modern stage. Directors of the ever-popular Romantic works would do well to take note.