Ingles

Song and Dance, and Gender, in ‘Dido’
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
-The New York Times-

The revival of Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas” at the Mostly Mozart Festival promises to be an arrestingevent, even for the blind: While the Mark Morris production occurs onstage, the extraordinary mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, placed with the musicians, will sing the Sorceress, as well as Dido, withher large, dramatic, dark but mobile voice, which can sound like molten lava.
The line of illustrious singers who have performed both roles for Mr. Morris includes Della Jones and Sarah Connolly; Ms.Blythe, who was Orfeo in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2009 revival of Mr. Morris’s staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” also sang Dido and the Sorceress for Mr. Morris at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley,Calif., in 2011.
Dido is tragic, noble, lovelorn; the Sorceress is comic, gleeful, heartless. Are they two roles or one? Purcell’s opera shows them as protagonists of alternating scenes; the Sorceressplots Dido’s doom.
Traditionally the roles have been sung by separate singers. When Mr. Morris’s production was new in 1989 (in Brussels), Dido was sung by a mezzo-soprano, and the Sorceress, as inmany productions, by a tenor. But onstage Mr. Morris, from 1989 to 2000, danced both roles himself. In a 2006 revival, however, he split the roles between a female Dido and a male Sorceress; then in2009 he gave both roles to a man. In the performances from Aug. 22 through 25 at Lincoln Center, Mr. Morris, as in 2011, will have the roles danced by a woman: Amber Star Merkens.
This “Dido” — a truemasterpiece and the most tragically imaginative work that Mr. Morris has made — goes straight to the heart of Purcell’s dramatic structure, making the Sorceress not just Dido’s nemesis but also herantithesis. Each heroine has her court. But Dido is Eastern, Old World, humorless, grand; the Sorceress is a Western, lewd, modern bitch. Their fates are intertwined. When we first see the Sorceress,...