We're making an opera!!!!
The baroque opera for NZIEMF 2016 will be Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas performed by The Little Box of Operas on 26 and 27 February.
Jenny Burchell, Artistic Director of The Little Box of Operas writes:
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas was written for performance at the English Restoration court some time before 1688, and
later and more famously revived for Josiah Priest's school for girls. Superficially it is a simplistic and tragic love story,
in which the weak and unhappy Dido commits suicide following Aeneas's heartless seduction and abandonment of her.
Set in its true context of Restoration England, however, more powerful themes emerge. Dido is profoundly aware of
her precarious and isolated position as queen in a conspiracy-and malice-ridden court. An alliance with Aeneas can only succeed if he is prepared to abandon his own destiny in favour of hers; but Aeneas - strictly a man of action - has
little understanding of the true nature of queen-ship. Dido and Aeneas is a story of power, treachery and inescapable disaster - driven to the end by the Sorceress and her witches, who to the seventeenth-century audience would have been an all-too-terrifying possibility.
OUR INTERNATIONAL GUESTS FOR NZIEMF 2016:
John Foster - baroque trumpet - Sydney
Laura Rubenstein-Salzedo - baroque violin - San Francisco
Brandon Labadie - baroque oboe - Portland, Oregon
Szabolcs Illes - baroque violin - Budapest, Hungary