"Remember everyone, you are like one brain. You need to play as one. You're like the Borg from Star Trek," instructed North Wind Flute choir director Melanie Sever at a recent practice. The North Wind ...

All these personages figure in the play, but none of them ever sing. Such was the nature of semi-opera in Purcell’s time, a spoken drama with a vastly inflated score of incidental music, like a ...