Dido’s Ghost, a new opera by composer Errollyn Wallen, with libretto by Wesley Stace, incorporating Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, was commissioned by the Dunedin Consort and Edinburgh International Festival, amongst others, and is the second offering in the Festival’s opera programme.

It is performed in the mega polytunnel venue, which has a stage wide enough to accommodate the Dunedin Consort and a room with hatstand and chaise longue, curtained off from the band with draped fishnets.

The storyline is simple. Dido’s sister Anna turns up on Aeneas’s doorstep in Italy, where he has married a local princess. Anna is a refugee and he invites her to stay, bidding his wife, Lavinia, to make her welcome, but Lavinia is getting suspicious. Then, for no apparent reason, she just happens to have a masque arranged for after dinner, which just happens to be about Dido and Aeneas – this is the weak point of the opera; Shakespeare handles play-within-a-play much better. Cats, pigeons… Anna has already given Aeneas the true version of Dido’s death, now Belinda, no longer Dido’s confidante as in the original but MC of the masque, invites first Anna and then Aeneas to breach the fourth wall in the opposite direction and act out the love story. This is too much for Lavinia, who plots Anna’s death.

But … recall Dido’s Lament – ‘remember me’. As ‘Dido’ says, it is not she who haunts Aeneas, but his memories of her. As the opera reaches its denouement, it is Aeneas who sings the great lament, and then dies. Matthew Brook throws everything – including, I suspect, 300 years of male jealousy about so fabulous an aria – into a bravura performance.

He is not alone. Golda Schultz as Dido/Anna is both fragile and implacable, her voice as supple in the octave leaps of the modern music as in Purcell’s melodies. Nardus Williams is a confident Belinda, her large white collar giving her a pierrot-like appearance. Alison Cook invests Lavinia with plausibility – a bit doubtful from Anna’s arrival, she is easily played upon by Henry Waddington’s Sorcerer.

Wallen’s music is predominantly spiky, with technically-testing vocal leaps, but with sudden melodic passages in waltz tempo and, when Anna is dreaming of her sister’s warning, a driving guitar riff like the menacing soundtrack of an American cop show. The new music dominates until the masque, which initially is a bit like a Purcell juke-box musical then, just as life and masque become increasingly intertwined, so are new and old music. When Dido’s Ghost is delivering her final message, the Lament is rewritten into a duet for Dido and Aeneas.

The Dunedin Consort and conductor John Butt are on form though, on first hearing, the new music is difficult to assess. At the first notes of the Purcell, however, the crispness and sheer tidiness of their playing and singing is evident. The echo in ‘In our deep vaulted cell’ is particularly well-balanced. The direction of Frederic Wake-Walker and his assistant April Koyejo-Audiger is unfussy, giving space for the music and singing to speak for themselves.