Six voices, six instruments, three puppeteers and thirty lively puppets combine and conspire to perform one of the very first English operas, set in Carthage, based on a story from Virgil's Aeneid
Date/Time: May 6 2017, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Vancouver, Orpheum Annex | Event calendarCost: $20.00
Find tickets: here
A two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old love story allied with 350-year-old music composed by musical genius Henry Purcell and a libretto written by the English poet laureate Nahum Tate – and, of course, for these performances only, a lively bunch of contemporary puppets! Dido and Aeneas was one of the very first operas to be written in English, whose first public performance was in 1688 at a private girl’s school in the (then) village of Chelsea.
While the six instrumentalists (five strings plus harpsichord) and six voices from the Postmodern Camerata, led by guest musical director Dr Charles Barber (Artistic Director of City Opera Vancouver), present the music in all its baroque splendour, three puppeteers and thirty puppets (the latter ranging in size from six inches to six feet) bring to life the characters in this timeless tale of love gone wrong: a queen desperate for a new chance at joy, a hero washed up on a foreign shore but under direction of the Gods, a sorceress and two evil witches, some very fickle sailors, and a bloodied wild beast ...
This project has been made possible by the Vancouver Civic Theatres
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