Washington Classical Review

Mary Elizabeth Williams (right), with Chelsea Helm as Belinda, stars in Opera Lafayette’s Dido and Aeneas. Photo: Jennifer Packard

Opera Lafayette opened the new season with two firsts: its first performance with Patrick Quigley as music director, leading the company debut of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. The production, mounted in the unconventional space of Sixth and I Historic Synagogue on Thursday evening, offered reassurance, if any were needed, that the city’s leading baroque opera company is in good hands for its next phase.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, who made her Opera Lafayette debut last season with Morgiane, brought robust power to the role of Dido. Her chest voice roared dramatically, and she interpolated some scintillating high notes amid her agile runs. The soprano’s commanding stage presence, from her tall frame as well as vocal power, made her a regal queen of Carthage, with fearful blasts of anger and wounded pride. The opera’s climax, Dido’s lament (“When I am laid in earth”), has seldom sounded so like a howl of despair, with electric crescendos to searing high notes.

One of the few male roles in the opera, Aeneas, was originally sung by a tenor. In this reimagined score, it went to male soprano Elijah McCormack, who with shaved head, made a credibly steadfast Trojan prince, with a lovely top range. In keeping with Restoration theatrical tradition, bass-baritone Hans Tashjian sang the role of the Sorceress in drag. While his campy acting earned some laughs, vocally he was mostly pale and underpowered as the villain who brings Dido to ruin. Chelsea Helm’s light and airy soprano suited the role of Belinda, Dido’s handmaid, a bright performance that offered a counterpart to Williams’ imperious instrument.

As part of the almost entirely treble-voice casting, the seven women of the small chorus acted in concert with Helm in the many numbers they shared. The special arrangement of the choral numbers, made by Quigley, looked back to the premiere of this opera by the students at Josias Priest’s boarding school for girls in Chelsea in 1688 and 1689. These “schoolgirls” danced and sang the various choral numbers with rarefied intensity, playing the parts of students, witches, and even sailors with gusto.

Cecelia McKinley plied her forceful contralto with robust strength and elegant phrasing to the Second Woman, assisting Belinda, and more strikingly to the First Witch, in service to the Sorceress. As Second Witch and a Spirit, Kayleigh Sprouse’s more nasal soprano did not quite meld with McKinley in their ensembles together, and occasionally her intonation strayed from the center of pitch.

Photo: Jennifer Packard

Quigley conducted the small Opera Lafayette Orchestra of period instruments with clarity through minimal gestures. He lavished attention on the score, slowing down the pace of many numbers in ways that emphasized the music’s harmonic richness and dramatic power. This spaciousness also allowed his singers, especially Williams, to mine their lines for greater emotional punch.

While he led the large ensemble numbers, Quigley mostly allowed the continuo group of cellist Loretta O’Sullivan, theorbist and guitarist Dušan Balarin, and harpsichordist Andrew Rosenblum to accompany the recitatives without his direction. This group generally did so with flexibility and a strong narrative sense, enhancing the feeling of speech transformed into song, although there was one clunker of note disagreement in one of Aeneas’s recitatives toward the end of Act II.

Stage director Corinne Hayes set the action in the context of a private school for girls. The chorus of girls wore checkered skirts and navy blazers with the school seal on patches on the chest (costumes by Lynly Saunders). In this context, Dido seemed more like headmistress than queen, with Belinda as Dean of Girls. Bookshelves and desk lamps at the back of the raised stage area suggested a library, with library ladders, a movable desk, and benches turned into various set pieces (set design by Lisa Schlenker).

Something about the intensity of emotion in a girls’ school underscored the idea of womanly solidarity with Dido’s suffering. In the opening scene, the students eavesdropped and gasped as they observed their headmistress’s head turned by a romance, played by one of their own. Without compromising on the quality of adult voices, the original performance context of this celebrated opera has never been clearer to the ear and eye.

Dido and Aeneas will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Sixth and I, and 7:30 p.m. Monday in New York City. operalafayette.org

Photo: Jennifer Packard