Baroque Masterworks: Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda / Dido and Aeneas

Opera is regarded as the most lavish and expensive art form, as shown by the top price of $1500 for tickets to see the four works in Adelaide's $15million production of Wagner's Ring Cycle. But opera-goers in Melbourne have the chance to see a production that relies on a small cast and orchestra, rather than a budget-busting set, to establish direct, emotional contact with the audience.

"It's a very pared-back form," says Patrick Nolan, director of Opera Australia's last show in its spring season, Baroque Masterworks. 

The two works in the double bill, by Monteverdi and Purcell, come from soon after the birth of opera at the dawn of the 17th century. 

"The baroque style is minimal and direct compared to what came later," he says. "The 21st century couldn't be more different, where we are used to layers of meaning piled on top of each other." 

The production is part of a boom in baroque music-making in Melbourne, including critically acclaimed performances by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Italy's Il Giardino Armonico. 

Nolan, known for his elegant and concise direction, says his challenge is to allow the directness of the emotional approach to come through. 

"It is very spacious music and it has been a remarkable process working with the singers to peel back the layers," he says. 

The production opens with Monteverdi's 30-minute masterpiece, IlCombattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, followed by Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which is the first opera to have been sung in English. This ordering allows the evening to conclude with Dido's lament, which Nolan describes as one of opera's most well known songs. 

"The chorus follows with a lament that is some of the most sublime music ever written," he says, quoting: "With drooping wings, Cupids come and scatter roses on the tomb". 

Nolan says Purcell is speaking through time, reminding people that the pain of love "has always been and will always be". 

The opera is adapted from the chapter in The Aenead in which Aeneas (Angus Wood), the mythical founder of Rome, is washed up on the shores of Carthage where he falls in love with Dido (Deborah Humble). 

But Nolan says the opera makes Dido the main character. This allows her to sing her own death after her lover departs, contrasting with the starkness of the original, in which Aeneas looks back from his departing ship and sees the smoke of Dido's funeral pyre following her suicide. 

The opera was written in 1689, during the flowering of the arts in England in the era following the rule of Cromwell's puritans. Nolan says Purcell was aware of Monteverdi's works from earlier in the century because a copy he made of a score by the Italian has survived. 

Monteverdi's Orfeo, written in 1601, is regarded as the first opera. When he came to write Il Combattimento 23 years later, he developed a revolutionary style of music-making that mirrored the drama of the story. 

The story is taken from Tasso's long poem on the Crusades and tells of a Christian warrior, Tancredi (Han Lim) who falls in love with a Muslim warrior maiden (Ali McGregor) before later killing her in a duel. 

"She knew who he was, but because she wore an armoured visor, he didn't know who he was fighting," Nolan says. 

But, he says, because the action is described by a narrator (Wood), he wanted to find a way to dramatise the fight on stage. "Because the battle to the death is so intense, I wanted to see bodies going for it," he says. So he asked Lucy Guerin to choreograph the combat. The opera is over in less than 30 minutes, but Nolan says the two dancers are called on to work hard, and he also employs them in the Purcell work after interval. 

He says the beauty of the Monteverdi work is that the key issues are hidden: armour masks beauty, war conceals love and human strife is only the foreground to eternal peace. 

But stage direction is just one of Nolan's interests. Having directed the Paul Grabowsky/Joanna Murray-Smith 2002 opera, Love in the Age of Therapy, he is planning to film a documentary on the lives of Aboriginal singers Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter. This follows his direction of the 2004 Melbourne Festival show, Kura Tungar, with the two singers and Grabowsky's Australian Art Orchestra. 

A short film that Nolan wrote and directed in 1998, 389, was a finalist in Tropfest and screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival. 389 is about a bus route and a frustrated poet who hijacks a vehicle in order to find an audience for his poems. 

Because of his deep regard for him, he gained permission from the former dissident Czech poet, Miroslav Holub, to use one of his works.