Dido's luck gets worse in Highgate

In essence the ideas behind the Hampstead Garden Opera's production of Venus and Adonis and Dido and Aeneas were neat, but not in execution writes Michael White

4 December 2009

Venus and Adonis
Dido and Aeneas
Hampstead Garden Opera, Highgate, N6
Alexander Arkadov
St John's Smith Sq, SW1

There was no escape from Purcell last week as the BBC scurried around to do its bit for the composer's anniversary year before the year was out. Westminster Abbey, in whose precincts he spent most of his musical life and was then buried, staged a grand commemoration to mark the eve of his death on November 21. And countless churches (including my own) coerced their choirs into an attempt on his Ode to St Cecilia the following day - which, should you have forgotten, was the feast of the patron saint of music.

But amid all this, there was also an interesting Purcellian tribute in north London given by a small company I've lauded before on this page. For a semi-pro venture, Hampstead Garden Opera is surprisingly good, ambitious and innovative; and its autumn show, staged as usual at the Gatehouse, Highgate, was a double bill that paired Purcell's Dido (which everyone does) with John Blow's exactly contemporary Venus and Adonis (which almost no one does). And hearing them back to back made me wonder why this coupling isn't standard.

Blow had nothing like the genius of Purcell, and his Venus score is frustrating in that it's more masque than opera, with a string of instrumental dances that provide no strong dramatic shape and no big vocal number to haunt your ear (nothing like Dido's lament). But otherwise, the two pieces make a broadly convenient fit in style and story. Both are about abruptly terminated love. Both leave a woman on the stage alone, without her man.

And this production drew them even closer by superimposing a modern-day narrative that played one as a sequel to the other. The affair between Venus and Adonis became an illicit affair carried out while Adonis was in the process of marriage to someone else, provoking his death not on the tusks of a wild boar but on the knives of his angry in-laws. Meanwhile the "someone else" turned out to be Dido who then (courtesy of Aeneas) became a woman twice-spurned, and doubly vulnerable as a result. Small wonder she killed herself.

In essence these ideas were neat, though not in execution: the director, James Hurley, didn't keep control and had too much going on with too little purpose. Worse still, he had people jiving to baroque tunes - one of the tackiest clichés of contemporary opera staging and something that leaves me seething with annoyance.

But I did like his decision to make Blow's Cupid and Purcell's Belinda the same character: a photographer who captures the unfolding story (including Adonis's infidelity) on film and becomes the agent of fate. And there were commendable performances from Lucy de Butts in that double role, Christina Petrou as Venus, Rebecca Henning and Taylor Ott as a pair of decidedly perky witches, and above all from Helen Bailey as a warm and secure Dido who delivered her lament in an interesting way: not as grand tragedy but as the pale, exhausted monologue of someone numbed by grief. And why not? In this production it was, after all, her second time unlucky.

Alexander Arkadov is not a pianist I knew much about until I went to his recital at Smith Square, encouraged by a friend, and was dumbfounded by the colour, depth and stature of his playing. It was an all-Chopin programme of real character, delivered with a curious but wonderful technique. His forearms bounce, like rubber, on the keyboard; and the sound is slightly smudged, but also rich and glowing with patrician elegance.

He struck me as a very special personality, and I wondered why he was not a bigger name in the piano world - until the answer dawned. For all his virtues, he has a worrying, recurring loss of focus. In the middle of a passage of considered poise and purpose, suddenly he takes time out. And though he gets back into gear within a bar or two, that momentary loss is noticeable and disturbing. Why it happens I have no idea. But I wish he'd sort it out. He's too exceptional a pianist to allow his talent to be undermined by such a small but fatal flaw.