Early Opera Company/Curnyn – review

Wigmore Hall, LondonPurcell's Dido and Aeneas was long thought to have been composed for a girls' school in Chelsea. Recent scholarship, however, has suggested it may originally have been heard privately at the English court, and that its model was possibly one of the similar, small-scale works written for the French nobility for performance in an intimate setting. Charpentier's Actéon has sometimes been mooted as Purcell's prototype. That the two make an uncommonly fine double bill was proved ...

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