Dido and Aeneas
Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Scotland's “Theatre in the hills” has become something of a riverside multiplex with the addition of its studio space and the outdoor amphitheatre where the final offering of this summer’s season opened on Saturday.
Blessed by warm sunny weather, Scots Opera Project’s re-imagining of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with a libretto in Scots and Gaelic by Dr Michael Dempster and Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, had the ideal venue for a Pictish vision of Virgil’s Aeneid.
In the title roles, soprano Emma Morwood and baritone Colin Murray brought musical assurance and gravitas, Murray’s Aeneas also having the most lucid diction of the cast and Morwood on her best form for the Lament, its familiar “Remember me” superbly effective in Scots as “Yeese mind o’ me”.
Director David Douglas clearly had Shakespeare’s Macbeth in mind for his staging of the opera, giving us a suggestible hero and a more complex Queen as well as a Sorceress (Ulrike Wutscher) whose small coven resembled the tragedy’s witches and apparitions.
Company regular Coleen Nicoll got the tale off to a confident start as Dido’s handmaiden Belinda and Douglas himself sings the Sailor, whose brief, lighter tenor aria used the whole space, and the thirty community singers, imaginatively. The chorus, which provided step-outs in the smaller roles, was strong in the lower voices if less reliably in tune at the top and sounded best when arrayed behind the audience rather than thronged on an over-filled stage.
The instrumental accompaniment of musical director Andrew Johnston on an electronic piano with Claire Telford on violin and cellist Peter Harvey was adequate for the continuo but stretched elsewhere, although there was nowhere to put more players even if the budget allowed.
Far from being a barrier, the unique selling point of this Dido – its language – enhanced the accessibility of the work, and prompted thoughts about the allegorical political message in the Shakespeare, Irishman Nahum Tate’s source play, Brutus of Alba, and the Purcell work for which he adapted it. The outdoor setting is absolutely ideal, and the first performance included a miraculously-choreographed butterfly appearing to symbolise the departing spirit of the poisoned Dido.
Further performances to September 15.
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