Silent Opera do away with the orchestra

Audiences will have the chance to experience their own bespoke version of Dido and Aeneas thanks to Silent Opera's iPod-era staging
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Silent Opera
Your own personal Dido … Silent Opera.

I'm about to do something that has never been done before. Many people will throw their heads back and cry, "This is going against all that classical music stands for! Pre-record what should be a live performance? Nonsense!" I, however, would disagree. Modern culture has shaped itself around the iPod because of what music through headphones does to the imagination. I've been transported by my favourite pieces of music countless times in the solitary confines of my room, swaying and singing along; yet crammed into the arena in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall with a hardened Prommer pushing me backwards, I've found it hard to appreciate the soaring emotional heights of a piece of music: if only I had earphones, none of the crunching and coughing would disturb my imagination.

I'm an opera director, and I got to thinking how magical it would be to stage an opera using Silent Disco technology – a soundsystem that broadcasts club music to individual headphones, allowing dancers to rave in silence to their own personal soundtrack. For opera it would work thus: a live singer is fitted with a radio mic and fed back to a sound desk. There the voice is mixed live with the pre-recorded orchestral accompaniment and broadcast instantaneously to the audience's headphones. It frees them from acres of proscenium arch and orchestra pit. It means site-specific dramatics without losing the sense of narrative. Most importantly, it brings the intense emotion of the singer right into the listener's head. There's no space to lose a single note, breath or word.

Then I heard about a multidisciplinary arts festival under the arches of London Bridge looking for ideas. I applied for funding, and won a place. My first thought was, "Wow! Now I have to actually do this …"

Choosing the opera was one of the hardest tasks. I'm drawn to the dramatic, blood-spilling, heart-crushing masterpieces of the Romantic repertoire. But I quickly realised that there is a reason small companies don't attempt Salome or the Ring Cycle: you need upwards of 110 instrumentalists, before even counting the vast number of singers. I looked at my pitiful budget and returned to my well-thumbed Kobbe's Opera Book and decided that Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, with its intimate scoring and small cast, had all the elements I needed. Its complex central character appeals because she is so human. It's got choruses to suit each mood and a supporting cast with suitably contrasting intentions. It's an opera that can be staged alternatively without sacrificing its meaning.

When I pitched this last October, I blithely claimed it would be "no problem" to take a recording for use in my production and strip the vocal track off it. How foolish of me. Not only does that violate every copyright rule in the book, it's also expensive and technically impossible. So instead we've created our own recording; an intimate rendition of the piece with music provided by members of the Rare Theatricall headed by conductor Christopher Bucknall. The singers have had to nail down their interpretation of every phrase, weeks before they will perform it live. They can't rely on eye contact with a sensitive conductor able to make their orchestra respond to a singer's minute changes of pace or tone. It's been challenging – much of their concentration is taken up by listening hard to their accompaniment and musical cues, at the expense of dramatic tension.

Opera can be a fantastically intense theatrical medium, and I don't think it's living its full potential on the fringe. I don't believe in stripping down the orchestra to cram it into a small space - each instrument is a voice in a chorus, with a different accent to tell the story. But you can't hire the Coliseum every time you fancy staging Tosca. So, pre-record the orchestra and unleash the piece into an atmosphere it deserves, and your music can take on stratospheric emotional heights, and the audience can live the story with the protagonists.

Silent Opera: Dido and Aeneas is at Debut, London on 1 March and 3 March. Tickets:

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