Joyce DiDonato’s Dido; and a much improved “Handmaid’s Tale”

<First published online in the Financial Times on February 6, 2024>

For at least 15 years Joyce DiDonato has been one of a handful of superlative singers equally at ease in comedy and tragedy, and equally eloquent in four languages. On occasion, her vowels are compromised, her vibrato intrusive, yet she remains a supreme artist, as much through sheer triumph of spirit as through musicianship.

On Friday night, when she joined the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and his Pomo d’Oro ensemble at London’s Barbican in a concert performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, she was at her best. Haunting in Dido’s all-consuming melancholy from start to finish (“Peace and I are strangers grown”), she branded each word with its own colour, yet never broke the vocal line to do so, and achieved it all with consummate spontaneity. In Dido’s famous “Lament”, each “Remember me” had an entirely new emphasis. She ended that lament with her eyes raised. During the long choral lament that followed, all she did was slowly lower those eyes. The amalgam of intensity and restraint was ideal.

Dido has the most quotably eloquent libretto of any English opera (“Thus on the fatal bank of Nile/Weeps the deceitful crocodile”; “Death is now a welcome guest”). The words are by Nahum Tate, who subsequently became Poet Laureate. As for Purcell’s music, the Pomo d’Oro showed its brilliant variety of mood, rhythm, colour and melody. Two singers were outstanding: mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor as the Sorceress, with a cavernous chest register and wicked relish for malice; and countertenor Hugh Cutting, luminous and incisive as the Spirit who fatally sends Aeneas from Carthage.

The concert began with another 17th-century work, Carissimi’s Latin oratorio Jephte, composed probably fewer than 40 years before Dido. This beautiful, suspenseful, biblical music drama makes a striking counterpart to Handel’s oratorio Jephtha (1751), which was recently staged as an opera at Covent Garden. Emelyanychev marvellously brought Carissimi’s score to poignant life, with close interplay within his ensemble. Andrew Staples and Carlotta Colombo were both admirable as Jephte and his daughter. (They were also Aeneas and Second Woman in Dido.)

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Everything that was good about English National Opera’s 2022 production at the London Coliseum of Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale is now better — more lucid, more absorbing, more moving. Although this is dystopian drama, both the prose of Margaret Atwood’s original novel and Ruders’ music have sensuousness as a recurrent ingredient. As the opera’s protagonist Offred, Kate Lindsey’s voice sounds juicily lit from within by feeling, often with high threads of glowing tone that epitomise the lustre of the human spirit amid totalitarian repression.

Eleanor Dennis as Ofglen and Avery Amereau as Serena Joy also have handsome, “speaking” voices. Like James Creswell as the Commander and Rachel Nicholls as Aunt Lydia, they register not just as characters but as psychological forces.

The opera is opened and closed by the spoken words of Professor Pieixoto (a male role in Atwood) in the year 2195AD. Juliet Stevenson plays this part (wearing a white trouser suit and shirt) with an intelligent detachment about the early 21st-century events played out in the intervening scenes. The result is expressively human but with none of the urgency shown throughout the rest of the opera — the present coolly reviewing the past.

@Financial Times, 2024