Opera Reviews
29 March 2024
Untitled Document

A purity of line pervades ETO's triple bill



by Catriona Graham
Carissimi: Jonas
Gesualdo: I Will Not Speak
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas

English Touring Opera
November 2018
Sky Ingram (Dido)

What to do about Dido and Aeneas? It’s only half an evening long so it must be paired with something to give the audiences its money’s worth. English Touring Opera has chosen the educational route – the little-known Carissimi’s oratorio Jonas and a compilation of madrigals and motets by Gesualdo strung together with spoken text to give his biography. All three are performed by eight black-clad singers on a full stage without props or scenery.

In Jonas, directed by Bernadette Iglich, the narration is shared amongst the voices, with God as a bass. It is an interesting piece, with fast and furious writing depicting the storm before Jonas is thrown overboard and has to sing from the foetal position in the belly of the invisible whale. The singing – and playing from the Old Street Band – is crisp.

The words accompanying Gesualdo’s compositions are a mixture of factual narrative and contemporaneous writing – Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, St John of the Cross and St Ignatius Loyola. Jorge Navarro-Colorado provides the Spanish originals, repeated in translation for our benefit by other singers. The effect of the single narrative voice interspersed with the complex polyphony of Gesualdo’s music is dramatic.

His life was hardly the sunniest or most carefree, and the motets from Tenebrae are dark. Director James Conway finishes with the eight singers at the front of the stage holding candles and, in the Tenebrae tradition, each is blown out in turn, leaving stage and singers in darkness.

After the interval, the opening bars of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas place us in a very different sound world. Sky Ingram’s (Dido) voice is light yet rich. She is an unfussy singer – Dido’s lament is full of dynamics expressing emotion but histrionics are quite absent. 

The men have great fun as witches and drunken sailors – Navarro-Colorado and Richard Dowling are gleeful in conjuring a storm.  Nicholas Mogg as Aeneas is restrained in a good way, and Susanna Fairbairn makes Belinda, Dido’s maid, both lively and servile; she knows her place. Director Seb Harcombe shows that a bare stage works perfectly well for the drama

The words that spring to mind to describe the ensemble are clean and tidy – a purity of line and absence of self-consciousness about stylistics. This applies to the Old Street Band, as much part of the ensemble as the singers on the stage.  Jonathan Peter Kenny conducts with verve and rewards the appreciative audience with an encore – "Plorate, filii Israel" from Carissimi’s Jephtha. It is not the most cheerful piece in the repertoire, and it comes at the end of an evening of unremitting gloom. But when the music is as glorious and as well-sung and played, the effect is counter-intuitively uplifting.

Text © Catriona Graham
Photo © Richard Hubert Smith
Support us by buying from amazon.com!