Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
The Indian Queen by Henry Purcell and John Dryden
The Indian Queen by Henry Purcell and John Dryden. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
The Indian Queen by Henry Purcell and John Dryden. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The Indian Queen review – Lucy Crowe’s singing brings Purcell into focus

This article is more than 9 years old

Coliseum, London
Stylised violence, stylish conducting and extended ballets combine in this adaptation of an unfinished work by Purcell, resulting in a fragmentary but sometimes glorious night at the ENO

Peter Sellars’s version of Purcell’s The Indian Queen has reached English National Opera via Perm in Russia, and Madrid, where its subject matter seemingly hit raw nerves. “Version,” it should be pointed out, is the operative word here. The original consists of a sequence of songs and masques for a 1695 revival of a 1664 play by John Dryden, in which a Mexican setting thinly disguises a plea for Restoration liberalism after the intolerant rigour of the Commonwealth. Left unfinished at Purcell’s death, it was completed by his brother Daniel.

Sellars, deeming the Dryden “bizarre” (it isn’t), and Daniel Purcell’s completion “bad”, has jettisoned both, and expanded the score with songs, dances and choral music from elsewhere in Purcell’s output. The dialogue and original plot have been replaced with a narration drawn from the novel The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma by Nicaraguan writer Rosario Aguilar, which examines the Spanish conquest of Mexico through the eyes of three women who lived through it: Doña Isabel (Lucy Crowe), unhappy wife of viceroy Don Pedrarias (Thomas Walker); the Mayan princess Teculihuatzin (Julia Bullock), tragically in thrall to the genocidal conquistador Alvarado (Noah Stewart); and their daughter, the work’s narrator, Leonor (Maritxell Carrero), the New World’s first mestiza, regarded with male suspicion on both sides of the conflict.

Sellars’s staging, with its stylised violence, ritual gestures and extended ballets, has moments of remarkable beauty and some considerable longueurs, particularly in the second half, where the narrative focus blurs. The music itself is glorious, if variably performed. Laurence Cummings’s stylish conducting doesn’t prevent the internal choral balance coming adrift on occasion. Stewart and Walker are chillingly charismatic, though Walker can be effortful. As a woman broken by a man with an imperialist mission, Teculihuatzin resembles Purcell’s own Dido, and Bullock, a fine artist, is admirably intense. The real star, though, is Crowe, whose singing is simply breathtaking in its beauty throughout.

Buy tickets for The Indian Queen from The Guardian box office, here.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed