It has traditionally been said that Henry Purcell wrote Dido & Aeneas for a girls’ school in Chelsea in 1689, though it now seems that it was first produced a few years earlier at Whitehall. This performance aims to recreate the work as it might have sounded at its first court performance, shedding fascinating new light on Purcell’s matchless opera. The Sorceress is played by a man, the band consists just of a string quartet, Baroque guitar and harpsichord, and a number of sections have been restored that were cut out when the opera was incorporated into Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in 1700, including Peter Holman’s new reconstruction of the missing scene for the witches at the end of Act II.

The first half of the concert sets the scene for Dido & Aeneas by bringing together music written for the Restoration theatre, including Matthew Locke’s passionate Masque of Orpheus, performed in Settle’s play The Empress of Morocco (1673), and play songs by the Italian organist Giovanni Battista Draghi and John Blow, Purcell’s teacher, friend and colleague. Draghi and Blow were important influences on the young Henry Purcell, and 2008 is the 300th anniversary of their deaths.