Issued to mark the 350th anniversary of Purcell's birth, these two new recordings of Dido & Aeneas are striking for what they say about attitudes towards his music, both in the UK and abroad. The Chandos version, though by no means exclusively British, is essentially anglophone, and its cast is drawn from singers familiar to UK audiences. Alpha's performance, meanwhile, has a more cosmopolitan lineup, while its chorus and orchestra hail from Novosibirsk in Siberia. While neither is perfect, the latter is the stronger of the two.
The Chandos performance is the brainchild of its Dido, Sarah Connolly, who raised the money to make it and chose the rest of the cast herself. The argument that the quality of her collaborators prevents it from constituting a posh vanity project is open to dispute. Connolly has opted to fill the missing portions in the original score with music drawn from, and consequently chronicling, the productions in which she has taken part. She has insisted on too much of it, making a work famous for its conciseness seem curiously diffuse.
More significant, perhaps, is that though this is a recording that contains tremendous performances, Connolly's is not one of them. Her singing is, as always, supremely elegant and gracious - though here, as elsewhere on occasion, she equates a sustained mood of melancholy with emotional intensity. Her Dido sounds neither "prest with torment" in the opening scenes nor anguished at the close. The great singing comes from Patricia Bardon's lethal Sorceress and Gerald Finley's sincere, subtly anguished Aeneas. The playing, from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, co-directed by harpsichordist Steven Devine and guitarist Elizabeth Kenny, is exquisite.
Place the Chandos disc beside Teodor Currentzis's Alpha performance, however, and you notice a sedateness in the former, as if Connolly and her associates are still haunted by vestiges of the chastity that has characterised too many British Purcell performances since the 1950s. Currentzis reminds us that this is, first and foremost, an opera about desire, and offers us something at once sexier and more probingly tragic. MusicAeterna's playing doesn't have the OAE's refinement, but is infinitely warmer in sound and far more energetically committed. Dido - a soprano here, rather than the usual mezzo - is the remarkable Simone Kermes, whose subtly inflected singing exposes disquieting emotional extremes. There's a palpable erotic charge between her and Dimitris Taliakos's moody Aeneas, so that we understand completely why Dido's world becomes meaningless without him. The one weak link is Oleg Ryabets's Sorceress, who has none of Bardon's terrifying implacability. Otherwise, its iconoclasm is breathtaking.
