The way the concert is pre­sented will also be fairly unique among Opus 40 concerts. "The audience will be sitting in the amphitheater, so they will be looking south at the obelisk," Pickhardt explains ... "Usually people come from the house and concerts are done with people sitting on the lawn and looking northward, appar­ently. This will be just the oppo­site. The whole concert is pre­sented using the hill, the monu­ment, the cliff, there's a small grove, some trees in one little area, and we use that... So the music moves from place to place. The witches scene is ele­vated above everyone else. They are on a plateau, a circular ridge beneath the obelisk, so that it is almost mystical to hear their singing coming from that place."

THE CONCEPT was created by Rckhardt along with Ars Choralis members and associates Stephen Kitsakos, Johanna Hall, Ed Peters, and Arthur Fama. For this production, Ars Choralis will feature 33 singers and a six-piece instrumental ensemble.

"There are 30 in the chorus and three singers who are not members of the chorus," the director says. "Two are very con­nected to Ars Choralis, they are local people: Jan Evers-Davies is singing the part of the sorceress and Cecilia Keehn is singing the part of Belinda. Soprano John Eapusta has soloed for us in our last two concerts and just stopped the show each time. He's an extraordinarily gifted young man. He's going to sing the part of the Spirit. All the other singers are members of Ars Choralis. All but Dido will be singing in the
cho­rus. We have an orchestra of very fine instrumentalist string play­ers from the Hudson Valley Phil­harmonic and the Albany Sym­phony. It’s just a small ensemble of six people. Mary Jane Cory is the harpsichordist. She is very well known in this area. She is a professor at New Paltz, a specialist in early music, and a very gift­ed musician."

"DIDO AND AENEAS" is a mythic tale of tragic love and sor­cery.

Dido is the queen of Carthage and Aeneas is a prince of Troy," Pickhardt says. "His boat, because of a storm, is thrown off course and he lands in Carthage. They strike up a love affair. There's a group of witches who are very jealous of Dido. They plot to get rid of Aeneas by send­ing one of their own, masked, as
a spirit, as a messenger from Jove, who tells Aeneas that he must leave immediately to save Troy. Aeneas believes him and goes to Dido and says he must leave. Of course, she is very upset. She can't live without him.

Eventually he becomes apologetic and wants to change his mind ... At that point she says "That you have once thought of leaving me is enough. My life is over.' Indeed, she does die at the end. We don't know, in the myth, if she commits suicide or just dies from a broken heart... It has a sad ending."

The music of Henry Purcell is dramatic, early baroque music.
"The music is certainly engag­ing," Pickhardt explains. "The soloists have very dramatic dia­logue to sing and the choral parts are charming and engag­ing. My singers have all fallen in love with the music. It colors the words. In music we call it 'word painting.' Purcell would take a word like 'storm' and color it so that when the singers actually sing it, it sounds stormy. Much of it is light and airy and yet other parts are minor and very dramatic.