Purcell’s The Indian Queen, ENO

In the seventeenth century, English music was amongst the finest in Europe. From the melancholic songs of John Dowland to the pioneering keyboard works of Orlando Gibbons, in William Byrd’s choral mastery and William Lawes’ sublime and unprecedented dissonances, British composers matched a virtuosic understanding of established musical ideas with a roving taste for innovation. Then, for a mere few decades towards the century’s close, came Henry Purcell. Inspired by Italian and French operas and his country’s recent musical past, he created a distinct form of the baroque that made him the most celebrated composer of his time.
The Indian Queen, a semi-opera first performed just weeks after his untimely death in 1695, is surely one of his masterworks. Seldom performed because of its incomplete nature, the English National Opera is now granting Londoners the rare chance to see it in a sumptuous new rendition. Reworked by acclaimed director Peter Sellars, the gaps left by Purcell will be filled with a selection of his most sensuous anthems. Expect colourful, street art-inspired sets and costume, riotous dance passages and music almost agonizing in its delicate beauty.
Sellars has won acclaim for both his maverick retellings of classic opera and his commitment to new work. For this production, he has excised the original non-sung text – based on a complicated political play by John Dryden – and added passages from Rosario Aguilar’s The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma, a tale of Mayan colonization from a woman’s perspective. The elegant and exceptionally talented Julia Bullock takes the central roles of Teculihuatzin and Dona Luisa, joined by the lyric soprano Lucy Crowe as Dona Isabel. The ENO Chrous lends extensive support, while baroque specialist Laurence Cummings holds the baton. For all devotees of early music and the baroque, this is sure to be one of the operatic events of the year.