Carthage Conquer’d

Carthage Conquer’d: Dreams of Tunis in the Baroque Imagination

The capital of Tunisia was once the legendary city of Carthage. Its Queen Dido, loved and then abandoned by Aeneas on his mission to found Rome, inspired countless musical masterworks from the baroque era to Berlioz. This concert alternates baroque cantatas dedicated to the Carthaginian Queen with the Arabic form of improvisation known as Taksim, as two ensembles – one baroque and the other Tunisian, share a stage, offering a new hearing of Dido the misused monarch and the site of Northern Africa as both exploited resource and object of fantasy in the Western European mythscape.

Traditional Taksim, works of Cavalli, Montéclair, Purcell, Strozzi, and others

Jessica Gould, soprano; Aaron Brown & Amie Weiss, violins; Loren Ludwig, viola da gamba; Kenneth Merrill, harpsichord

Fatima Gozlan, ney & percussion; Brian Prunka, oud