
Ramster kept to simple, rather baroque formality in the Purcell, with carefully choreographed movement among the nine roles and white costumes enhancing the tableau effect. Paradoxically, the staging gave the singers more space to expand, and I never felt that this was a production that tries to make Purcell’s perfectly-formed opera bigger than it is. Dido’s classical, draped gown suggested the antiquity of the story; the more-or-less contemporary costumes for the rest of the cast suggesting its timelessness. In its minimalist, fluid way, the staging is very effective.
Sarah Shorter was a subtle, still presence as Dido, her finely graded tone expressing Dido’s passion and anguish with intense directness. Her ‘Lament’, rather than being a plod through emotional glue, flowed freely, and Shorter’s skilfully managed diminuendo, with its absence of dramatic closure, neatly suggested the story’s immortality. Samuel Pantcheff as Aeneas didn’t have the same clean phrasing, but his nobility and weight in ‘Jove’s command’ hit the spot. Sónia Grané’s Belinda was a well-pitched foil to Dido, and her lyrical, bright singing matched the ease of her acting. As the Sorceress, Rozanna Madylus in her figure-hugging little

Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse has no operatic equal in ghostly chill and ambiguity. The three singers play the keepers who vanished from their remote Flannan Isles lighthouse in 1900 as well as the officers of the relief ship, who discovered the abandoned lighthouse. The ending of the opera is a blurring of fantasy and reality – like the mystery of the Marie Celeste this is a story that will never lay down.
Ramster’s production kept a few bits of furniture from Dido, but otherwise it was all down to smoke and mirrors, or rather mist and Jake Wiltshire’s stunning lighting – atmospheric, versatile, at times obliterating – it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the transporter chamber of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. Perhaps Ramster missed a trick by not having the Prologue’s horn solo (as the leader of the inquest) placed in the auditorium, but we still got the feeling that something terrible was about to unfold, which was more than fulfilled in the ensuing main act. It was

All three singers made an overwhelming impact, and when the 13-piece ensemble got into its considerable stride, the musicians and Lionel Friend did full justice to Maxwell Davies’s extraordinarily imagined, stream-of-consciousness score, now a 33-year-old classic.
- Performed again on Friday 17 May at 7 p.m.
- Royal Academy of Music