Il Giornale dell'Umbria, Wednesday, 12 September 2012

"Dido and Aeneas" of Purcell at Panicale

PANICALE -- Finally a Dido realistically "black" like that which we imagined at our school desks when they made us study the Aeneid. Whether or not she was a Phoenician princess before she became the Queen of Carthage, she was always mediterranean, therefore nothing to do with the British songstresses of whom Purcell would have been thinking when he assigned his Dido and Aeneas to a college of young girls from good families in Chelsea.

The masterwork of English baroque theatre was mounted on the stage of the Caporali Theatre with the freshness of a vocal laboratory of a high level. The performance was in fact put in place as the final presentation of a course in baroque singing organised and taught by Sheila Barnes, a specialist in seventeenth century repertoire who held the sessions of the vocal studio in the picturesque town itself. A professor at Cambridge University, Ms. Barnes boasts a curriculum which includes her mastery of the Italian language which she practiced on the benches of the University for Foreigners not so very many years ago. Let us hope, therefore, that in the next edition of the Festival "Musica Insieme Panicale" one may be able to savour, thanks to her, a page of the extirpated Italian baroque repertory. For now, then, this Dido, sung by an international cast which included young Japanese, German, English, and American singers and even one Italian.

The protagonist, the mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene, a splendid woman of Caribbean extract, was certainly not a student, from the moment her "realistic" Dido poured forth, thanks to a profound professional vocalism and an intense emotional charge. Alongside her the tenor Brian Smith Walters in the shoes of this Aeneas, ever less sympathetic: how could anyone leave a woman like that? Role of importance and high achievement also for the countertenor Andrew Radley [Sorceress]. Put in finished form with optimal voices and convincing performance. Leonardo Lollini directed, and very well, the choir and instruments of L'Accademia degli Unisoni. A production in concert form which would merit wide circulation.

(translation of Italian article written by Stefano Ragni)