Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas anniversary production at Manchester RNCM

Jan 11 2009 by Michael Green, Chester Chronicle

THE Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) and Manchester Camerata combine forces at 7.30pm on January 17 to present a dramatic concert performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, England’s oldest opera.

With productions scheduled countrywide during 2009, the 350th anniversary of Purcell’s birth, this represents an opportunity to catch the first Dido of the year. The performance takes place in the Haden Freeman Concert Hall at the RNCM in Manchester.

Manchester Camerata’s permanent guest conductor, the baroque specialist Nicholas Kraemer conducts, and Bethan Rhys Wiliam (tutor in movement and dance at the RNCM) directs.

The production represents the biggest artistic collaboration yet between the two organisations following the formalisation of their partnership 18 months ago, when Manchester Camerata took up residence in the RNCM’s new Oxford Road Wing.

The two organisations have also jointly put together an education and learning project which links in to Dido and Aeneas.

Three Camerata musicians and two young singers from the RNCM, plus composer Richard Barnard and drama practitioner Anna Jewitt, are working with a group of 25 students from Years 8–10 at Chorlton High School, a specialist arts college, to create a prequel to the opera.

During five sessions in the school the practitioners and the school pupils – some of whom are of African heritage – will create a music drama imagining what happened in the Dido and Aeneas story before the two lovers had their fatal meeting in city of Carthage, on the coast of what is now Tunisia.

Purcell and the music of West Africa will provide the musical inspiration. The end result of these sessions will be performed by the school students and the Manchester Camerata and RNCM musicians before the main production on January 17, at 6.30pm.

A BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music session in the first half of the concert adds another dimension to the evening. With the aid of RNCM and Manchester Camerata musicians Radio 3’s Stephen Johnson will explore excerpts from the opera. The resulting programme will be broadcast later in the year.

Tickets, priced at £21, £18.50, £16.50 and £9.50, are available from the RNCM box office on 0161 907 5555 or from www.rncm.ac.uk.