An Early Music Vancouver Festival presentation. At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Thursday, July 30

When tenor Charles Daniels, in the role of First Sailor, stumbled drunkenly to the front of the stage to sing—and collapsed afterward, while resuming his place in the chorus—his antics were met with a few titters rather than the broad laughter they deserved. The audience was more reverential than the performers at Early Music Vancouver’s summer-festival production of the English opera Dido and Aeneas.

Under the musical direction of Alexander Weimann, the singers and musicians explored the full range of moods and emotions in Henry Purcell’s early baroque masterpiece.

Soprano Monica Whicher brought a fine sense of doomed vulnerability to Dido, queen of Carthage, who’s madly in love with the Trojan prince Aeneas, a classical hero who acts like a classic jerk. Aeneas, performed here by Sumner Thompson, is destined to found Rome, so the gods won’t let him stay long with Dido. At least that’s his excuse for so swiftly dumping her. And to make matters worse, a group of English witches—notably absent from Roman poet Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, Purcell’s inspiration—have got it in for poor Dido.

As witches and enchantresses, Pascale Beaudin and Jacqueline Woodley, along with sorceress Danielle Reutter-Harrah, sang and acted with the kind of wicked glee that, like Daniels’s capers, merited more response. Perhaps it was a little unsettling to see singers in gorgeous gowns conspiring like naughty schoolgirls or Cinderella’s ugly sisters.

The pantomime element was enhanced by the chorus of all the other singers, who responded to these villainous machinations with “Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho”, suggesting a gang of evil-minded Santas in snappy suits. When they ended the scene with the echoing “In our deeply vaulted cell the charm we’ll prepare/Too dreadful a practice for the open air”, the sibilants were drawn out with playful malevolence.

Such comic relief only made Dido’s abandonment more deeply felt. The evening belonged to Whicher, from the Carthaginian queen’s revelation of her heart’s torment to her dying aria at the opera’s conclusion. Whicher didn’t dramatize unduly but gave colour and pathos to each syllable and showed impressive command of volume.

The tension between the depths of the emotions evoked and the elegance of Purcell’s score was embodied in Weimann’s expressive shoulders, as he led the ensemble with energy and a fine ear for detail. Violinists Chloe Meyers and Noemy Gagnon-Lafrenais played with verve and sensitivity, and the baroque trumpets of Kris Kwapis and Lena Console gave a lightly mournful hue to even the brightest moods in the music.

A later work by Purcell opened the evening, the ode “Come Ye Sons of Art”, composed for the birthday of a more fortunate queen, England’s Mary II. The music was rich in variety, appropriate for a celebratory occasion. In the alto duet “Sound the Trumpet”, Reutter-Harrah and Reginald Mobley sang with great clarity of diction, and Weimann added a touch of swing to “Strike the Viol, Touch the Lute”, sung by Daniels who maintained his perfect vocal poise even as a vertically challenged sailor.