Henry Purcell’s moving Baroque opera features William Christie with Les Arts Florissants in a production at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, directed and choreographed by Blanca Li, that is both stylish and sometimes confusing.
By Heidi Waleson
June 20, 2023 5:13 pm ET
Ana Vieira Leite, Kate Lindsey and Renato Dolcini, with a dancer in the foreground
PHOTO: PABLO LORENTE
Barcelona
Baroque opera productions headlined by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have stopped traveling to New York now that BAM and Lincoln Center are no longer bringing over these kinds of elaborate classical-music offerings from Europe, so I was glad to have the opportunity to catch Les Arts’ typically stylish staging of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu on Saturday. Mr. Christie teamed up with director and choreographer Blanca Li, plus six dancers from her company, and visual artist Evi Keller, whose work is built around “Matière-Lumière,” a fusion of matter and light. The result read like an art installation animated by music and dance, intriguing if sometimes confusing.
The small instrumental ensemble, with Mr. Christie leading from the harpsichord, occupied one side of the stage. Ms. Keller’s abstract décor was a trio of glowing, textured metallic drops; everything was sepulchrally lighted by Pascal Laajili. “Dido” is short, so the evening got a prelude: Purcell’s ode “Celestial Music Did the Gods Inspire,” its solos and choruses eloquently sung by a nine-member vocal ensemble and enacted by the alternately sinuous and acrobatic dancers. The work, which describes the power of music while invoking figures of antiquity and mythology such as Virgil and Orpheus, is a more cheerful piece than “Dido.” It managed to make its point, despite the shadowy lighting and Laurent Mercier’s all-black costumes, which made the singers disappear into the gloom.
In Nahum Tate’s “Dido and Aeneas” libretto, based on an episode from Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Dido’s love story is brief. Aeneas, the Trojan hero, arrives in Carthage; he and the queen fall in love and have a passionate one-night stand; the gods, embodied by the malevolent Sorceress, insist he depart to found Rome; Dido, betrayed, kills herself.
Here, the three principal characters in “Dido” were part of the décor: looming statues, perhaps some remnants of antiquity. They stood on tall, rolling pedestals, so tightly wrapped in metallic foil that matched the backdrops that they could only move their arms, shoulders and heads. When they were pushed downstage to sing, their wrappings glowed. Movement was left to the chorus and the dancers, who were on stage almost continuously.
As a result, one focused intently on the vocal qualities of the singers, especially mezzo Kate Lindsey, a profoundly expressive Dido. In her first aria, “Ah! Belinda, I am pressed with torment,” every anguished line had a different vocal color. Her ferocity as she commanded Aeneas, “Away, away,” seemed to explode from her body, and in her final lament, her soft singing of the repeated line “Remember me” conveyed a woman dissolving in grief.
Mr. Dolcini and dancers
PHOTO: PABLO LORENTE
Ana Vieira Leite brought a gentle supportiveness to Belinda, Dido’s confidante. Bass Renato Dolcini made a regal Aeneas who managed to make his regret at deserting Dido persuasive. But the choice to have him double as the Sorceress was questionable. With just a bit less light to indicate that he was now someone else, the switch was confusing, and he didn’t capture the Sorceress’s vocal harshness and cackle. By contrast, the ensemble singers Maud Gnidzaz and Virginie Thomashad all the necessary spite and gleeful viciousness as the two Witches; Jacob Lawrence also shone as a jaunty Mariner.
Along with the ensemble singers, the dancers flowed around the pedestals, sometimes literally evoking the emotions of the characters; at others, forming a kind of moving classical frieze, albeit in contemporary black costumes, which they changed depending on the scene. At the end of Act 1, the rejoicing dance as Dido and Aeneas got together had explicit choreography for couples in bathing suits. The more abstract movement sometimes came across as visual filler—intriguing to look at, but not indicative of anything other than looming tragedy. Some of the most striking sections had the dancers sliding prone across the floor, which was wet. The best use of this technique was in the funeral chorus at the end, as the dancers twined their bodies together to make a boat and rowed somberly across the stage, as if crossing the Styx.
In contrast to the visual gloom of the staging, Mr. Christie and his eight players were vivacious. Felix Knecht, the excellent continuo cellist, kept the pulse with verve; the flute and oboe players, Sébastien Marq and Pier Luigi Fabretti, brought a piquant airiness to the score. At times, the different genres in the show were at odds: When the Sorceress called up demons from the underworld, the dancers, writhing in diaphanous tulle skirts, were all in, while the ensemble, singing their echoing curse, “In a deep vaulted cell,” were not nearly creepy enough. But every time Ms. Lindsey sang, even though she was almost entirely motionless, the dancers seemed irrelevant.
Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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