Dido Reimagined: Upshaw & the Brentano String Quartet at SF Performances

Last Thursday, on an evening that fortunately for me was a pause between the fierce storms pounding California, I went to Herbst Theater to hear Dawn Upshaw & the Brentano String Quartet in a beautifully chosen (& beautifully played) program titled Dido Reimagined. The first half featured early modern British composers (Henry Purcell, Matthew Locke, John Dowland, Thomas Tomkins, William Byrd, Robert Johnson); vocal numbers alternated with instrumental, culminating in Purcell's great lament from Dido & Aeneas, When I Am Laid in Earth. The second half was a new monodrama composed for Upshaw & the Brentanos, Dido Reimagined: A Response to Purcell's "Lament", with music by Melinda Wagner setting a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann. San Francisco Performances was the presenter.

Most of the numbers in the first half were relatively brief. After the first one or two, about a third of the audience started applauding after each piece. It's nice that people want to show appreciation but I wasn't wild about this – to me it interrupted the flow & mood of the performance. At least there wasn't that weird tension you sometimes get in concerts between people who insist on applauding after movements & those who support the old "no applause between movement" rules (personally, I like the rule, as I find the applause often, as I said, disrupts the flow & mood, & insisting on applauding seems like audience members imposing their own views in a "look at ME!" way on people who perhaps are there for other reasons – I'm not going to get too worked up about it, though; there are plenty of other things to be annoyed about).

The intricate melancholy knots of this intimate music were (with the usual irony of art born out of sorrow) a joy to hear under the Brentanos (Serena Canin & Mark Steinberg on violin, Misha Amory on viola, & Nina Lee on cello). I wish more string quartets would explore this repertory. Upshaw entered with the quartet (the first number was the song Oh Let Me Weep from Purcell's The Fairy Queen) & instead of exiting & re-entering for the songs she stayed on stage with them throughout, very presently listening, a nice bit of staging that helped create an unbroken & collaborative atmosphere. Unfortunately, contrary to their usual practice, SF Performances did not provide the words to any of the vocal numbers, & though some of them (Dido's Lament, obviously) are familiar, others are less so, & it was sometimes difficult to follow the poetry. This is not a comment on Upshaw's excellent articulation, it's just a reality of the human voice – the higher you go, the more difficult it is to convey words clearly.

Upshaw, of course, is a beloved long-time star among singers, & the qualities for which she is justly beloved – her intelligence, her adventurousness, her commitment to words & music, her generosity in communication – were all present. It's also true that her voice, particularly at the beginning of the evening, was audibly frayed, though less so as the evening wore on (perhaps as she got warmer & more into it?). In the second half, the new piece written for her, she sounded stronger. I have been to some late-life concerts from other beloved artists that were difficult & depressing to listen to, so great was the decline from their athletic prime – I did not feel that here. If anything, for me the signs of aging in her voice resonated with the program's themes of loss & mortality & contributed to the theatrical & thematic power of the performance.

The lack of a printed text was a definite disadvantage to the new piece, which is intended as a re-vision of Dido's story, turning away from the narrative of a woman killing herself over a man's lost love towards one of a woman healing herself. The first lines are "I am not dead / I did not die" & Wagner sets them so that I - I - I is repeated several times over flickering figures – so you get a sense of a woman both asserting her individuality & trying to pull it together. There is a sense of reconciliation with the self at the end (though I couldn't quite make out if the last line was "she [Dido] is live" or "she is loved". In between – well, as I said, it was difficult to follow without the words. I did not get a significant sense of development in words or in the music, however consistently attractive it was. It seems Dido is on a long post-break-up voyage; there are passing references to such non-classical items as the Port Authority & lobster ships, so we seem to be somewhere off the Northeast coast of the United States. There is a long passage referencing the myth of Callisto, transformed into a bear & then into the constellation Ursa Major, which led to a reference to Saint Ursula & her 10,000 Virgins. It was difficult not to feel that the roughly 40-minute piece was a bit meandering.

For a work that takes a determinedly contemporary view of Dido, there is a weird absence of any consideration of her as a political or executive figure: while she's out meditating on love & loss as an act of empowerment & self-healing, just who is ruling Carthage? What force is rushing into that power vacuum? In Dido's case, the personal is definitely political, but this re-imagining of Dido simply removes the political dimension, creating in place of the powerful Queen of Carthage what seems like a modern middle-class woman going through a bad break-up, which, as we all know, is rough, but we also know that, given the polemical point here, she's going to – she has to – come through her troubles with renewed strength. What exactly is at stake?

You can't really rewrite Dido as "not a victim" unless you first reduce her, in her earlier manifestations, to simply a victim, & that I think is not how the character has ever come across. If I'm remembering the Aeneid correctly, Dido has the last word, or rather, the last refusal to speak: when the Roman hero goes to the Underworld, she walks past & disdains to acknowledge him – to use a violent & apt phrase, she cuts him. & of course in Purcell's opera she memorably has the last words, with the emphatic instruction remember me. I doubt anyone walks out of that opera thinking that Aeneas is a great guy & Dido a weakling; the emotional affect is too complex. Berlioz's Dido goes out in a blaze of magnificence. These are all intensely memorable, deeply moving moments. Yes, we go in knowing how the story ends, but each telling reaches that end in a different & revealing way.

To make an obvious point: wandering around working on self-healing lacks the dramatic punch of setting yourself on fire. The former is no doubt a better way to live life, & the impulse to rewrite traditional narratives to examine their assumptions about power is a socially useful & generous one, but you end up with a kind of eighteenth-century moderation & rationality that doesn't really explore the deeper stranger recesses of the psyche, & can seem emotionally out of step with our cataclysmic times.