Please note: tickets for the February 7th performance are not available on this site. Please consider the Wednesday, February 8th, concert or check with Manitoba Opera for remaining tickets.

The singular voice of countertenor Daniel Taylor returns to MCO’s stage for the MCO / Manitoba Opera co-presentation of the music of Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, with the Theatre of Early Music, in period style. Embrace that!

The Theatre of Early Music is an 18-piece vocal and instrumental ensemble founded by Taylor. TEM is "serious music-making of the highest order," according to Gramophone Magazine. Those of you who have heard Taylor sing at earlier MCO concerts will recall its other-worldly power, made even stronger with his new choir: "Daniel Taylor’s early music choir holds audiences spellbound" (The Ottawa Citizen).

Choose from two dates for this show — a Tuesday or a Wednesday!

Taylor is "Canada’s star countertenor"

Daniel Taylor last graced our stage in 2007 when he sang two works from Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egito. This time it’s mostly Purcell, and Daniel will introduce Winnipeg to his Theatre of Early Music Project.

The choir and orchestra of the TEM present magnificent, yet sometimes neglected, choral and instrumental repertoire. Their stunning a cappella programmes invoke the practices and aesthetics of former ages which inform thought-provoking and passionate oratorio performances.

Pre-concert event

Brandon University School of Music Opera Studio;
David Playfair, director; 6:45 pm

Programme

Henry Purcell
The Moor’s Revenge (Z 550)

Thomas Tallis
O nata lux de lumine

Henry Purcell
Remember not, Lord, our offences (Z 50)

Henry Purcell
Hear my prayer, O Lord (Z 15)

Henry Purcell
Dido and Aeneas (Z 626)

Concert sponsor: LBL Holdings

Daniel Taylor

Now an exclusive recording artist for Sony Classical Masterworks (although he has previously appeared on over 80 CDs with companies such as DG Archiv, Decca, Sony, BIS, Analekta and Harmonia Mundi), Daniel Taylor is one of the most sought-after countertenors in the world. He receives invitations from an ever-widening circle of the world's leading early and contemporary music ensembles, appearing in opera (Metropolitan Opera, Glyndebourne, San Francisco, Rome, Welsh National Opera, Canadian Opera, Opera North, Montreal Opera and Munich); oratorio (Gabrieli Consort, Monteverdi Choir/English Baroque Soloists, Bach Collegium Japan, Les Arts Florissants, Berlin Akademie fur Alte Musik, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, King's Consort); symphonic works (Cleveland, St. Louis, Lisbon, Philadelphia, Tonhalle Zurich, Toronto, Gothenburg, Rotterdam, Montreal); recital (Vienna Konzerthaus, Frick Collection (New York), Forbidden Concert Hall (Beijing), Lufthansa Baroque Festival and Wigmore Hall (London)) and film (Podeswa's The Five Senses for Fineline — winner at Cannes and also of a Genie).

During the 2010/11 season, new recordings were released: Handel's Messiah with the Montréal Symphony / Nagano (for Sony), Bach's St. John Passion with the Bethlehem Bach Choir / Funfgeld (Analekta). Daniel also appeared on the new soundtrack with the Cirque du Soleil (Universal) and on a pop album with Jonathan Reilly-Roe. Handel's Messiah performances include Dallas Symphony / Rilling, Tafelmusik, the Montreal Symphony / Nagano and a return to the San Francisco Philharmonia Baroque/McGegan. Daniel returned to the St. Louis and Cleveland Orchestras and performed the Pergolesi Stabat Mater with both the National Arts Centre / McGegan and the Netherlands Bach Society / Cremonesi. Recital tours took him across Canada as well as to Europe and South America. Dame Emma Kirkby and Michael Chance appeared with Daniel and the Theatre of Early Music.

Highlights of 2011/12 include the Bach B minor Mass in Los Angeles and San Francisco with the Philharmonia / McGegan, Handel Duets with Deborah York and Bach's setting of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater with Dame Emma Kirkby on tour across North America, Bach's St. Matthew Passion with the Kammerchor Stuttgart / Bernius, Orff's Carmina Burana with National Arts Centre Orchestra /Matheus and Bach's Christmas Oratorio with Orchestre Métropolitan / Nezet-Séguin. This season sees the worldwide release of Daniel's new recital disc Come Again, Sweet Love on Sony.

As well as being the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Choir and Orchestra of the Theatre of Early Music, Daniel is also a Professor of Voice at the University of Ottawa, an Adjunct Professor at McGill University and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto and the University of Victoria.

Theatre of Early Music

The Choir and Orchestra of the Theatre of Early Music (TEM) is a Canadian-based ensemble of some of the world's finest musicians, sharing a particular passion for early music.

TEM's distinctive style, coupled with its artistic director Daniel Taylor's expertise and enthusiasm, leads to captivating readings of magnificent but often neglected works. In various combinations, leading international musicians in the field perform on the platform provided by the Theatre of Early Music in concerts conducted by Daniel Taylor in its regular series in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, on tours around the world and on recordings. The choir and orchestra of the TEM appear in some 30 concerts every year, recently having performed on stages in France, Argentina, Brazil, England and China. Future engagements include tours to Europe, Asia, and across North America including the TEM's debut in Carnegie Hall.

The Theatre of Early Music's first recording on BIS, Couperin's Leçons De Ténèbres (Blaze and Taylor) was released in March 2005; critics commented, "the beauty of this recording bows to no other." This highly-praised disc was followed by an imaginative Renaissance programme, Love Bade Me Welcome, featuring the actor Ralph Fiennes reading poetry as well as countertenor duets with James Bowman and Taylor. The last release on the BIS label was Pergolesi's Stabat Mater with Dame Emma Kirkby and Daniel Taylor. BBC Music Magazine commented: "Emma Kirkby at her most serene is matched by Taylor as if they were two faces of a single musical entity."

The Choir and Orchestra of the Theatre of Early Music now records exclusively for Sony Classical Masterworks. The best-selling debut disc on the Sony label entitled The Voice of Bach was praised in Gramophone Magazine as "serious music-making of the highest order". The disc received five stars from both BBC Music Magazine and Classic Music CD, was featured on BBC's Desert Island Discs and received acclaim worldwide, including reviews from the Times (London), the Globe and Mail (Toronto), the New York Times, The Guardian (London) and La Scena Musicale (Montreal).

The Theatre of Early Music is motivated by a desire to communicate both text and music to their audience. The TEM explores the depth and substance of the early choral works and instruments in literature, sharing their passion and ideas with audiences worldwide. The key aspect involved in the approach of the Theatre of Early Music is revelation: just as in the modern day we have restored the frescoes of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, so do we hope to reveal the original beauty of ancient works. Therein we hope to understand, communicate and celebrate this inspirational music.

Suite: Abdelazar, or The Moor's Revenge, Z. 570
Henry Purcell

Purcell is widely considered England's greatest composer prior to Elgar. His compositions in many fields — especially church music, incidental scores for the theatre, and operas — gave the period of the English Restoration much of its finest musical art.

As a boy, he had been a member of the prestigious Chapel Royal Choir. After leaving the choir, he probably studied with a number of celebrated composers, including John Blow and Christopher Gibbons. His rise to the highest ranks of the profession proceeded swiftly. At 18, he was appointed composer for the violins at court; he became organist at Westminster Abbey in London two years later, and added the position of organist to the Chapel Royal three years after that. Between 1680 and the death of King Charles II in 1685, Purcell composed virtually nothing but music for the royal court, including more than 70 choral anthems. The king's exile in 1688 greatly diminished Purcell's contributions to that field.

From 1690 onwards, he shifted his focus to the theatre. He composed numerous operas and semi-operas, plus music to accompany more than 40 plays. A typical set of incidental stage music from this period would include numerous preludes, interludes, dances and songs. Purcell composed the score for Abdelazar, or The Moor's Revenge, in 1695, for a revival of a lurid tragedy by Mrs. Aphra Behn. The production failed to win an audience, but the attractive and marvelously varied music earned sufficient popularity to be included in a collection of his stage works published two years later.

In 1945, Benjamin Britten, a great admirer of Purcell, chose the stately Rondeau as the theme upon which to base the entertaining and ingenious educational composition, The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

O nata lux de lumine (O light of light)
Thomas Tallis

Tallis lived through a period of enormous political upheaval. As a major musical figure (Gentleman of the Chapel Royal) at the sixteenth-century English court of the turbulent Tudor dynasty, he was required to compose music for no fewer than four monarchs, and in nearly the same number of distinct styles: Catholic services for King Henry VIII; English vernacular services for King Edward VI; the reinstated Latin Liturgy under Queen Mary; and both English and Latin works under Queen Elizabeth I.

It was a mark of his skill, versatility, imagination and practical acumen that he contributed great music to all these traditions. Another factor may have been a genuine (and also perhaps life-saving) personal modesty. "As he did live, so also did he die, in mild and quiet sort," read a tribute on the occasion of his death.

The exquisitely beautiful, five-voice hymn O nata lux de lumine was published in 1575 in a collection of Cantiones Sacrae (Sacred Songs) that Tallis co-created with William Byrd. The text consists of the first two verses of a seven-verse hymn for Lauds on the Feast of the Transfiguration. The date of composition is uncertain, though it seems likely to have been created during the reign of either Mary Stuart or Elizabeth I.

Remember not, Lord, our offences, Z. 50
Henry Purcell

Purcell composed this eloquent, melancholy five-voice anthem during the period 1679-1681. The text comes from the Litany in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Hear my prayer, O Lord, Z. 15
Henry Purcell

This poignant, eight-voice anthem dates from approximately 1685. Purcell may have composed it for the funeral of King Charles II. It is the only surviving portion of a much larger work. The text comes from Psalm 102.

Dido and Aeneas, Z. 626
Henry Purcell

Venus and Adonis, an opera by John Blow, one of Purcell's teachers, was produced at the royal court of England's King Charles II during the early 1680s. It made such an immense impact on Purcell that he and librettist Nahum Tate closely modeled their own opera, Dido and Aeneas, upon it.

Details of Dido's conception and premiere remain sketchy. The earliest known performance took place in 1689. The location was a boarding school for young ladies in Chelsea run by a choreographer, Josais Priest. The opera may have been created as much as five years earlier, and may have been intended to be performed by professional musicians at the royal court rather than the amateur females of Priest's school. No record exists of further performances during Purcell's lifetime. A serious rival for the title of Great English Opera would not appear until 256 years later, when Britten's Peter Grimes launched a revival of interest in the form in that country.

In 1700, following the free-wheeling theatrical practices of the day, selections from Dido and Aeneas were inserted into a London production of Shakespeare's play, Measure for Measure. Four years later, it was revived, once again as one component of a larger production. Then it disappeared for nearly a century. In the late 1700s it was revived as a concert work, the form in which it has been best known and most effectively presented up to the present day.

It is Purcell's only true opera, in that it is sung from beginning to end, without the interpolation of spoken dialogue (the same approach that Blow had used in Venus and Adonis). Nahum Tate based the text on his own play, Brutus of Alba, or The Enchanted Lovers (1678), itself derived from the epic poem of ancient Greece, The Aeneid by Virgil. More than 50 operatic versions of this part of Virgil's epic have been produced. Only Purcell's and Berlioz's (The Trojans, completed in 1858) continue to receive regular productions.

The text that Purcell set presents the story in highly compressed form, to the point where significant episodes in the plot are barely mentioned. This would have posed little difficulty for the early audiences, they being well-versed in classical mythology. Purcell responded brilliantly to this challenge, clothing the text in music that is rich in expressiveness but concise in form. Dido and Aeneas remains one of the great examples of tragic opera, regardless of period or place of origin. It includes a great deal of dance music, a practice carried forward from an earlier English musical form, the masque.

It originally began with an allegorical prologue, the music of which has been lost. Act One takes place in the palace of Dido, the widowed queen of Carthage, a large city on the north coast of Africa. She is entertaining Prince Aeneas, who landed in Carthage after fleeing the fall of Troy. She is clearly falling in love with the handsome, dashing soldier. Although her confidante Belinda urges her to express her feelings, she hesitates to do so. Instead, Aeneas declares his love for her and after some initial hesitation she acknowledges that the attraction is mutual. Her courtiers celebrate the prospect of a royal union.

The first scene of Act Two is set in a cave on the seashore near the city. The evil sorceress and her coven of witches are plotting Dido's death. The sorceress announces her scheme: knowing that Dido and Aeneas intend to go hunting together, she intends to summon up a storm that will ruin the hunt and drive the royal party back to Carthage. Then one of her followers will appear to Aeneas, disguised as Mercury, messenger of the gods, and order him to leave Carthage and forsake Dido. The scene ends with a vigorous Echo Dance of Furies.

Scene Two takes place in a grove of trees where the royal hunting party has stopped to rest. Relaxing entertainment is provided by the chorus and by a female soloist. Aeneas displays the head of a boar he has just killed, then the sorceress's magical storm breaks out. The false Mercury appears and commands Aeneas to sail away immediately. He agrees, reluctantly, and wonders sadly how he will break the news to Dido.

Act Three, Scene One is set in the harbour, where Aeneas's men are preparing to depart. Watching from nearby, the sorceress and her witches celebrate the success of their sinister plot in a frenzied dance. Scene Two returns to the palace and shows the final meeting of Dido and Aeneas. She mocks his protestations of fidelity, then dismisses him. Suddenly she gives way to despair, and sensing that her life is quickly drawing to a close, she sings a poignant farewell. When I am laid in earth is one of the most beautiful and moving arias in all opera.