Thu 4 Jul 7.30pm
Fri 5 Jul 7.30pm
Sat 6 Jul 2.30pm & 7.30pm
Frederic Wake Walker Director
Jonathan Tilbrook Conductor
The story of Dido and Aeneas didn’t end with Dido’s death. Errollyn Wallen takes the story forward, interweaving a full performance of Purcell’s great tragedy with this imaginative piece, which had its World Premiere at The Barbican, London in June 2021.
‘Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate’ sings Dido at the end of Purcell’s opera. But life isn’t quite as easy as that, and some memories have a destiny of their own.
Set several years after the Carthaginian queen’s death, Dido’s Ghost finds Dido’s sister Anna abandoned on the shores of Aeneas’s new kingdom, igniting a murderous jealously in Aeneas’s wife Lavinia – and as events play out, its characters confront a past that refuses to fade.
Errollyn Wallen CBE (Trinity Laban’s Professor of Composition) has been called a “renaissance woman of contemporary British music” (The Observer) and is an inspirational figure to aspiring young musicians and composers.
Commissioned by outstanding music institutions from the BBC to the Royal Opera House, she is as respected as a singer-songwriter of pop-influenced songs as she is a composer of contemporary new music.