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Reviewer: Richard Lawrence There’s a lot going for this newcomer. The scale is modest: single strings, with a theorbo to supplement Christopher Monks’s harpsichord; a chorus of eight, three of whom also take solo parts. The playing is wonderfully vital: the Triumphing Dance at the end of the first act will have your foot tapping, and the opening of Act 3 is similarly cheering – until, that is, Miles Golding puts down his violin to sing the part of the Drunken Sailor. The players also give due weight to the harmonic clashes in the ritornello to ‘Ah! Belinda’ and in the Prelude for the Witches. The chorus are light on their feet in the dance numbers but aptly expressive in ‘Great minds against themselves conspire’ and the final ‘With drooping wings’.
The soloists are equally fine. Brighttoned Elin Manahan Thomas is well cast as Belinda, though her phrasing is not quite precise in ‘Pursue thy conquest, Love’. Roderick Morris is pleasingly unexaggerated as a countertenor Sorceress. Aeneas is very much the lesser half of the pair of lovers: Robert Davies seizes the moment in his brief soliloquy. Rachael Lloyd – lovesick, imperious, resigned – is an excellent Dido, her famous Lament no less effective for being restrained. My reservations concern the witches. The chorus’s ‘ho ho!’s are pretty standard but the cackling extends to the First and Second Witches’ ‘But ere we this perform’; and the instrumental Echo Dance of Furies is not improved by additional vocalisation. Minor points, perhaps, not significant enough to detract from an overall recommendation. But don’t overlook René Jacobs’s performance with Lynne Dawson and Gerald Finley; and of course the young Janet Baker with the English Chamber Orchestra under Anthony Lewis (1961) remains peerless.
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