News Samuel Sebastian Wesley

[…] written in 1981. It starts with solo oboe, inspired by the pibroch whose form uses theme and variations. Then the oboe is joined by drones from the bass, and the textures both evoke the bagpipe and yet seem to shy away from it. A wonderfully intriguing piece. The final work on the disc is Cecilia McDowall's Subject to the Weather, written for the 2010 Presteigne Festival and incorporating both Welsh folksong (The Blackbird) and S.S. Wesley's hymn usually sung to the words 'The Church's one foundation', inspired by a place in Powys were the local Methodist minister in the 1880s created a cooperative enterprise to alleviate poverty and deprivation. The result proves to be an intriguing and engaging mix, for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon. This is a wonderfully engaging and imaginative disc, and certainly a wonderfully lively take on the idea of a piece based on traditional music. […]

[…] Lament, as it’s often known, beginning “When I am laid in earth …” How can we bring it on in a version for today, except by quite a lot of imaginative reconstruction and restoration, possibly inserting bits of other music by Purcell or even his contemporaries – as Jonathan Miller did in the production seen at Buxton Festival in 2008 and (rightly) welcomed internationally? Errollyn Wallen has come at it quite differently. With text by Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), she’s composed her own chamber opera, set some time after the Tate-Purcell snippet from Ovid’s Fasti, and taking up aspects of the classic original to ask What Happened Next? Into that she dovetails the original Dido and Aeneas, almost complete, as a “masque” staged at court by Lavinia, the second Mrs Aeneas, to recall the broken love affair that he, now king of the New Troy in Italy, can […]

The week in classical: Dido’s Ghost; Der Rosenkavalier; Philharmonia/Salonen – review 

Barbican, London; Garsington Opera, Wormsley; Royal Festival Hall, LondonErrollyn Wallen had a bold new take on Dido and Aeneas, while the Philharmonia sparkled with a staging of Strauss’s opera and bid farewell to Esa-Pekka Salonen The inexhaustible magic of the classics – of any culture or time – lies in how they provide source material for those who follow after. Think of Picasso’s reworkings of Velázquez’s Las Meninas: part homage, part new creation. Henry Purcell and his librettist, Nahum Tate, in their short opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), weren’t alone in plundering Virgil’s Aeneid for the story of the Queen of Carthage and the Trojan hero, condemned to abandon her to pursue his destiny as founder of Rome. The Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen has taken up the tragedy of Dido, working with the librettist Wesley Stace to explore what happened next. The result is

Errollyn Wallen, Henry Purcell: Dido's Ghost - Henry Waddington, Allison Cook, John Butt, Dunedin Consort - Barbican Hall 2021 (Photo Mark Allan / Barbican) Errollyn Wallen, Henry Purcell Dido's Ghost; Isabelle Peters, Nardus Williams, Allison Cook, Matthew Brook, Henry Waddington, Dunedin Consort, John Butt, Frederic Wake-Walker; Barbican Centre Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 6 June 2021 Star rating: 4.5 (★★★★½) A new opera which explores the boundaries between past and present as Wallen's opera interrogates Purcell's and creates an intriguing modern drama Errollyn Wallen, Henry Purcell: Dido's GhostNardus Williams, Isabelle  Peters(Photo Mark Allan / Barbican) Operatic composers have largely been uninterested in what happened to Aeneas and the Trojans refugees when they left Carthage and arrived in Italy. Errollyn Wallen and Wesley Stace's new opera does just that, showing us Aeneas now settled in Italy. The new opera Dido's Ghost is a sort of sequel to Purcell's […]