Bury Bach Choir is delighted to bring a concert performance of Purcell’s only opera, Dido and Aeneas, to Bury St Edmunds. This enchanting work, which has touched the hearts of generations of listeners, recounts the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the Trojan hero Aeneas, and her despair when he abandons her.
Purcell set his opera in three acts, for full chorus accompanied by four part strings and continuo. First performed between 1683 and 1689, the opera includes 'Dido’s lament', an aria of melancholic beauty, perhaps unsurpassed in all opera, which will be performed this evening by the award winning, Suffolk-born opera star Clare Presland. The opera embodies love, romance, betrayal and tragedy in equal measure.
To set the scene for this evening of seventeenth century English music and to reflect the other side of Purcell’s working life, his major contribution to English sacred music, the concert opens with three anthems by Purcell, including 'I was glad when they said unto me'. The Suffolk Baroque Players follow this with an orchestral suite from Handel's Water Music.