I'd been looking forward to the Royal Opera House double bill of Dido and Aeneas, and Acis and Galatea, for months. Apart from the self-evident joy of hearing a top-notch performance of the lovely Purcell opera, the treat lined up was that Wayne McGregor, the resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet, was directing. It should have been heaven. My two favourite art forms, opera and ballet, combined.
I should have known better, of course. I was in a minority – I do realise this, because I ran into various people at the interval who were having a lovely time – but I found Dido and Aeneas awfully formalistic and static. Things only seemed to liven up when McGregor had real dancers to choreograph. He didn't seem to want to do much with the chorus at all, bar make them walk in interesting ways from one end of the stage to the other; he seemed considerably less interested in the possibility of non-dancers moving than regular opera directors such as Peter Sellars (one thinks of the classic Theodora production at Glyndebourne) or Richard Jones (say, his Trojans at English National Opera or even the recent ENO Pagliacci).
More importantly, he didn't seem to get his principal singers to relate to each other in any cogent way that would actually make one start to care about them. All emotion thus stripped away, I found myself completely unmoved when Sarah Connolly's Dido slit her wrists. (WHY make her slit her wrists five minutes before the end, when she is surrounded by the chorus and Belinda, who just watch her die in a ludicrous manner when every bone in your body screams, send for the doctor, or bandage her up? Very silly when Tate's libretto is very unspecific indeed about her death so that you can do pretty much what you like with it. And what on earth was that ghastly projection of a rearing horse? Dido's soul wafting up to the heavens? I hope very much not.)
Mercifully, McGregor really did seem to hit his stride in Acis. This was wonderful stuff. It's a very different beast of course – a kind of intimate masque with a tragi-comic, pastoral tone. The dancers completely made sense here – with Hildegard Bechtler's set one felt as if one had been transported into a Claude or a Poussin painting, and the appearance of dancers – each soloist paired with a principal singer – somehow made perfect sense, because this was a world that, like Theocritus' or Ovid's, had created its own rules and had its own logic (even though the singers, or at least the boys, looked a bit like Alex James off to do some cheesemaking). I could watch Edward Watson and Eric Underwood all day; and Danielle de Niese as Galatea – well, I may not be the world's greatest fan of her voice but she is certainly a wonderful stage presence, and fantastically game of her to dance a solo with Watson...
