Fri 10/3 @ 7:30PM
Thu 10/9 @ 7:30PM
Fri 10/10 @ 7:30PM
Sat 10/11 @ 7:30PM
Sun 10/12 @ 4PM
Another local classical music group opens its season this weekend. This it it’s Cleveland’s baroque chamber orchestra Apollo’s Fire, whose international reputation grows every year.
It will kick off with an ambitious production, what it calls a “lightly staged” production of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, featuring Aryssa Leigh Burrs as Dido and Edward Vogel as Aeneus, with the Apollo’s singers joining the orchestra to back them up.
The opera, which debuted in 1689, is based on a section of Virgil’s The Aeneid, in which Queen Dido is courted and seduced by war hero Aeneas who leaves her to answer a call from the gods. It’s one of the earliest English operas.
“What I love so much about Dido & Aeneas is its dramatic tautness,” says Apollo’s Fire founder and artistic director Jeannette Sorrell, who is helming the production and created a new prologue since Purcell’s is lost. “This is a fast-paced, emotionally intense story that could happen to any of us today. In the manner of a Greek tragedy, the events take place all in 1 day — Queen Dido falls in love with Aeneas, they consummate their love, he abandons her, and she dies in sorrow. But Purcell tells us this story in barely an hour. It’s breathtaking.”
The opera will be performed five times in the next week at diverse venues: Greystone Hall in Akron on Friday October 3; Lake Erie College in Painesville on Thursday October 9; The Tudor Arms Hotel in University Circle on Friday October 10; the Cleveland Institute of Art on Saturday October 11; and Baldwin Wallace University’s Gamble Auditorium on Sunday October 12.
Go here for tickets and more information.