Period instruments bring the music of the past alive

“DIDO’S GHOST”, a new opera which had its premiere this month at the Barbican Centre in London, is a beguiling mix of old and new. Errollyn Wallen, a Belize-born British composer, and Wesley Stace, a librettist, weave a fresh story around Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”. That opera told of an abandoned Carthaginian queen and a Trojan royal lover who put duty and ambition above passion; in Ms Wallen’s and Mr Stace’s tale, Dido’s sister, Anna, lands in the kingdom Aeneas has founded, meaning to remind the proud ruler of his betrayal. Purcell’s gorgeous original nestles within this frame and at the close, in a startling reversal, it is the grieving Aeneas who sings Dido’s great lament: “When I am laid in earth…Remember me.”

This reinvention of the mythic tale unites the 17th and the 21st centuries in soundscape as well as sensibility. The instruments of Purcell’s time—from harpsichords and a Baroque guitar to the theorbo, a kind of outsize lute—sit alongside an electric bass and a contemporary drum kit. The varying tones and timbres Ms Wallen summons from her time-travelling array of musicians turn the gulf between past and present into a conversation across centuries and styles. “Dido’s Ghost” hauntingly shows that so-called “period” instruments can, and should, play key parts in the music of today.

The musicians of “Dido’s Ghost” come from the Dunedin Consort, an Edinburgh-based Baroque ensemble formed in 1995. Its work on Ms Wallen’s opera is one of 23 projects funded by the Continuo Foundation—a charity created in 2020 by Tina Vadaneaux in response to the shutdown of live classical music during the pandemic. Continuo, whose first round of grants totalled £150,000 ($209,300), specifically aims to fund period-instrument ensembles, often made up of freelancers hit even harder by the loss of live performance than players in conventional orchestras.

Over the past half-century, thanks to the achievements of pioneers such as Dame Emma Kirkby, a singer, and Sir Roger Norrington, a conductor (both patrons of Continuo), period performance has grown into one of the glories of British music. What came to be known as HIP (historically informed performance) became the hip wing of the classical world. It drew on the ethos, and sometimes the personnel, of the jazz and folk scenes as much as on traditional—ie, 19th-century—models of orchestral music.

By the 1980s, though, HIP had gone mainstream. Now the lucid, lively and rhythmic Bach or Handel heard by even casual listeners—with a brisk pace, bright colours and warmer, slightly lower pitches than the “concert pitch” of mainstream orchestras—bears traces of the post-1960s revolution in practice. Listen to older Bach recordings, and they will often feel staid, sluggish and treacly. Period instruments have brought the music of the past alive, in spite of endless heated arguments about what counts as “authentic” sound.

Yet the covid crisis showed the extreme fragility of the art form’s base. From its inception, the HIP movement in Britain had been a labour of love largely kept afloat by excitement, enthusiasm and curiosity rather than secure funding from institutions. The players of Baroque violins and viols, of harpsichords and fortepianos, of Baroque recorders and oboes, of valve-less “natural” trumpets and horns, of lutes and theorbos, along with their instrument-makers and restorers, ensembles, venues and audiences—all flourished within a complex, delicate ecology. The pandemic threatened to overwhelm it.

Continuo intends to retune the period-music environment not just with one-off support but a wider intervention as “a new centralised resource for connecting ensembles, musicians, audiences and venues”. Other beneficiaries so far include “Boogie Knights”, a “plague party” hosted by Joglaresa, a medieval music group; the Linarol Consort of Viols’ celebration of the 500th anniversary of the death of Josquin des Prez, a Flemish Renaissance master-composer; and the Ex Cathedra choir’s online staging of Bach’s St John Passion. Ensemble Marsyas recorded Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto while the English Concert revived “La resurrezione”, Handel’s early oratorio. Continuo plans a showcase event in September to highlight its first year of activities.

Decades of enterprise and innovation by period-instrument musicians have opened the ears of music-lovers. In the wake of covid-19, Continuo plans to preserve and extend those gains. In “Dido’s Ghost”, for instance, Ms Wallen demonstrates that a theorbo and an electric bass can make bittersweet music together. But then ancient and modern tones have often harmonised well. Rock buffs will tell you that Jimi Hendrix often tuned down his guitar to a lower pitch, emulating the sound of many Baroque ensembles and instrumentalists today.

“Dido’s Ghost” is available to stream via the Barbican Centre website. It will be performed at the Buxton Festival and at the Edinburgh International Festival