Participants: ensemble Duo Barocco: singers Renata Dubinskaitė and Saulė Šerytė, together with longitudinal flute player Ieva Baublyte, baroque cello player Roma Jaraminaitė and harpsichordist Vaiva Eidukaityte.

The programme of arias and duets by the English Baroque genius Henry Purcell is full of lyrical and dramatic elements, as well as fantastic and comic ones. The enigmatic title of the concert, The Hidden Opera, reflects the specific situation of English opera in the 17th century. The most dramatic chapter in its history is the political upheaval that saw the monarch's own head fall from the guillotine in 1649.....

The government that overthrew the king imposed puritanical attitudes, the theatres were closed down and opera, which had been demanding exclusive luxury, was universally condemned. However, opera-like productions were sometimes held secretly in the homes of aristocrats, simply as performances or "representations". Thus, "hidden" opera existed under the guise of other performing genres.

The great English Baroque genius Henry Purcell was born in 1659, the last year of the prohibition of opera, and worked under the restored monarchy to satisfy the nobility's need for spectacular stage entertainment. However, the development of English opera was not only influenced by the Puritan ban, but also by the tradition of 'masques' in the court. 'Masques' were imaginative performances consisting of spoken and sung episodes in which masked dances (often performed by nobles and even kings themselves) took centre stage. The genre was so popular in England that 17th-century English opera remained partly a 'mask', with sung music playing a sort of complementary, secondary role. In a very short (he died aged just 36) but prolific musical life, Purcell wrote music for more than 40 plays, masques or semi-operas. These are characterised by the development of the plot according to the principles of dramatic performance, i.e. the main characters on stage speak and the singing is usually done by fantastic characters - goddesses and gods, witches, cupids, allegorical figures such as Night, Mystery or Frost, or by pastoral, comic characters, such as a drunken poet or a querulous chambermaid. The duets and arias in the Hidden Opera concert will therefore sparkle with fantastic and humorous colours. They reveal Purcell's talent for painting different characters. The concert programme, which is enriched with narrative and staging elements, includes episodes from the semi-operas King Arthur, The Tempest, The Faerie Queene, The Queen of the Indies, Pausanias, Dido and Aeneas, and others.