January 27, 2009 - THE PLAIN DEALER
Purcell opera is a meeting of Cleveland and Montreal minds
by Donald Rosenberg

A handful of the singers are the same. Otherwise, the production of Henry Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas" that Apollo's Fire will present this weekend bears no resemblance to the one music director Jeannette Sorrell and colleagues offered in 1998 at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Sorrell's first "Dido" production with her Cleveland Baroque Orchestra was a lavish partnership with Toronto-based Opera Atelier. The 2009 version -- honoring the English composer's 350th birthday -- will be intimate, with a tiny orchestra (10 players) and a spare theatrical approach scaled to the compact space at Cleveland's Josaphat Arts Hall.

The 1998 production "had a different slant," says Sorrell. "Dido was very weak and didn't even have the strength to kill herself at the end. She just kind of died of sadness.

"This time, we have a female stage director, and I'm taking the show back to its roots in the sense that Purcell originally conceived it and performed it with girls at an elite school."

While the principal singers in this week's "Dido" are adults, the youth chorus known as Apollo's Musettes will take part in a new Prologue. The music for the original Prologue is lost. Sorrell threw out the mythological text, since it has little to do with the opera, and wrote her own.

Her collaborator in this week's Purcellian adventure is Marie-Nathalie Lacoursiere, a Montreal-based actress, stage director and Baroque dancer and choreographer. Lacoursiere is supplying more than the direction for this "Dido." She crammed her luggage with 15 costumes she hand-sewed for the production, as well as fabric paintings of columns, fountain and grove -- designed by Caroline Guilbault -- that will serve as the sets.

With her extensive experience in music, dance and theater, Lacoursiere is looking forward to using her varied artistic chops here in "Dido," as she will later this year in Canadian productions of Purcell's "King Arthur" and "The Fairy Queen."

"For me, opera is where everything comes together," says Lacoursiere. "The singing part I understand, being a musician, and also the movement and theater. It's really what I like -- to work with orchestra and singers."

Lacoursiere arrived in Cleveland last week purposely without an established concept for the "Dido" production. She knows every corner of the piece but prefers to tap into the individual qualities of the singers to find the right theatrical aura.

"You often make a pattern in your head and it doesn't work," she says. "Sometimes [singers] have better answers than you. It's not like taking puppets left and right. Yes, I have a good idea and know the score well, but then it could change, and it could get better."

The Cleveland "Dido" is Lacoursiere's third encounter with the opera. She previously staged or choreographed productions in Montreal and Toronto. She met Sorrell through soprano Meredith Hall, who sang Dido with Apollo's Fire in 1998 and returns this week to do the tragic honors.

Along with her training as a pianist and singer, Lacoursiere studied period dancing and ran a commedia dell'arte company. She became a director when singers asked her to stage their performances.

Lacoursiere is applying Baroque practices to her new "Dido" staging. But she's also relying on herself and colleagues for the physical gestures needed to bring the sad tale of Queen Dido and Prince Aeneas to life.

"You have to use your imagination and what you know about music, what you know about the paintings of the period, how [people] lived," says Lacoursiere. "There's a lot of answers in the music itself.

"I look at singers, how they are, how they move, and then find the character. Coming from a dancing background, the body talks a lot."

Lacoursiere will be dressing those bodies in costumes she found and tweaked with needles and thread. She comes from a long line of seamstresses: her mother made Baroque costumes; her grandmother created men's clothes.

Along with her costumes and Guilbault's sets, Lacoursiere has brought masks for the witches, a headpiece and a crown. Carlos Fittante and Robin Gilbert Campos will perform the many dances laced through Purcell's score, while Sorrell will preside over an ensemble comprising pairs of harpsichords, recorders and theorbos (long-necked lutes) and string quartet.

"It's usually done with a full Baroque orchestra with multiple strings," says Sorrell, who'll record the work next week with her Apollo's Fire forces. "I consciously chose to do it [this time] with chamber players, since it's what Purcell originally conceived at the boarding school."