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Dido and Aeneas

Updated August 30, 2010 12:00:00

Hiphop meets baroque in this unique performance of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas - complete with new music by Canberra composer Geoffrey Lancaster.

Source: 7.30 ACT | Duration: 5min 55sec

Topics: opera-and-musical-theatre, hip-hop, canberra-2600


CHRIS KIMBALL, PRESENTER: The English composer Henry Purcell wrote the opera Dido and Aeneas, in the late 17th century.

Sometime in the early 18th century, the score to the prologue went missing.

But what could that have to do with Canberra?

Well, Geoffrey Lancaster is one of our pre-eminent musicians, his various posts include one as Associate Professor at the ANU School of Music and he has rewritten a Purcell prologue.

This new production features hip hop, a cast of more than 40 and a chamber ensemble led by Lancaster on harpsichord.

Hip hop and baroque, who would have thought?

Tonight's world premiere is at eight, so we will pre-empt them by a few minutes.

Kate Evans reports.


GEOFFREY LANCASTER, MUSICAL DIRECTOR: The story of Dido and Aeneas in a nut shell is boy meets girl, Aeneas meets Dido, they fall in love, witches decide they will thwart the relationship and end up creating a context where Dido kills herself her lover Aeneas dies at sea. Very uplifting!

DIDO (singing): And let forsaken Dido die.

CAROLINE STACEY, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: So, Robert, let's have a look.

GEOFFREY LANCASTER: This opera by the English composer Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, it's a standard part of the opera repertoire now but it wasn't always that way. It was brand new in we think 1688, 89, maybe even, 81, we don't quite know.

We certainly know it got a performance as a revival performance at a girls school in 1689, and that it took a long time for it to cotton on.

People didn't realise how brilliant it was.

From the revival performance at the girl's school there was a printed text. So we know what the words were but for some reason half of the music of this opera has been lost.

And the bit that's been lost is what's called a prologue, which had to do allegorically in fact with the coming of William and Mary to the throne of England.

So what I've done is taken the words of this prologue, and I've set them to music in the style of Henry Purcell.

I'll tell you, it's amazing. You realise that Henry Purcell is great.

Everybody knows this but when you sit down and start to analyse what he's done with his music so that you can actually copy it, you begin to realise what an absolute genius this man was.

It's passionate music, it's buoyant, beautiful, filled with life, filled with passion and at the same time he sets the rhythm of English words consummately well.

KATE EVANS, REPORTER: It sounds like a daunting task to try and write music to fit with his music. How did you go about it?

GEOFFREY LANCASTER: Yeah, it's a hard acted to follow, unfortunately.

But what I did is I took some of the choruses from other works that he's already written and rejigged them so that I could insert these new words into his choruses and then occasionally I wrote a few movements myself.

And that was a daunting task as you say because one has to be as good as Henry Purcell, if you can be.

CAROLINE STACEY: Don't anticipate what the response is going to be.

I guess what I'm doing with it is totally reworking it within a contemporary setting.

So it's very much street art inspired and we're drawing upon urban street culture and there's a couple of hip hop artists in the work who dance their way through it.

I guess if I was to be asked why I've done that, it's because I'm working with young singers and part of their education is learning how to develop characters and a process and I didn't want them to be in a world of sort of received interpretation.

So we have some very coarse opera acting that's based on productions that are pretty standard. I really wanted them to sort of re-imagine things from the ground up and I wanted them to work with an idiom that they were really familiar with.

GEOFFREY LANCASTER: Of course what we're doing with this opera production is using instruments from Henry Purcell's time, 17th century instruments. We're using harpsichords, guitars, harp as well as the usual and to be expected string instruments, violins, viola, cello and double bass.

So it's quite an interesting combination of musical colours.

KATE EVANS: And how do these early instruments fit with the modern sort of hip hop flavour of this particular performance?

GEOFFREY LANCASTER: When I first heard about it I thought mmm, yes, how will that go?

But having sat in on rehearsals what I'm finding remarkable is that the shapes of hip hop dancing, the phrasing of hip hop dancing, the sense of stress and release of tension, the creation of curlicues and the release of that energy, it's utterly 17th century and 18th century, it's unbelievable.

I suppose it goes to show that there's nothing new under the sun.

CAROLINE STACEY: For me, watching the prologue in rehearsal feed into Dido and Aeneas I guess as people might understand it has brought to me a completely different understanding of I guess the nature of performance, in a 17th century context and maybe how audiences would have responded to the work.

Which I think is a more complete a form of entertainment because we actually travel from the cheesiest of sort of comedy right through to, you know, the absolute devastation of Dido's lament, so it's a much longer journey.

CHRIS KIMBALL: And there's another performance at eight tomorrow night and one at four on Sunday, it's at the Street Theatre but we're told tickets are selling fast.