ALMOST 90 years ago George Bernard Shaw was asked to review an amateur Purcell–Handel concert at Bow in London's East End. ‘… entirely unacquainted with these outlandish localities and their barbarous minstrelsy’, he nevertheless set off (with a revolver as a precaution for his hazardous journey), determined not to leave Purcell's great music to the mercy his paper's other music critic. Although the ‘Bowegians’ evidently did not do Purcell full justice, GBS was delighted with the music. ‘Dido and Eneas’, he declared, ‘is 200 years old, and not a bit the worse for wear’.

For all the professionalism of the most recent of recordings, I wonder, nevertheless, whether 90 years later we are any closer to understanding how best to bring Purcell's wonderful little opera to life. The six currently available recordings, in chronological order and with the conductor's name first, are these:

Dido and Aeneas is said to have been first heard in 1689, not on the public stage but at Mr Josias Priest's boarding-school at Chelsea, performed by young gentle-women. Priest was a dancing master, and no doubt one of his main aims in commissioning this work from Purcell was to show off his young ladies in a series of dances. A small string orchestra and the necessary male voices for the chorus and the part of Aeneas must have been imported especially for the occasion. Nahum Tate's libretto has often been ridiculed: such lines as ‘Our plot has took,/ The Queen forsook’ and ‘Thus on the fatal banks of Nile/ Weeps the deceitful crocodile’ do not fall well on modern ears, but the plot is laid out with skill and economy. Purcell's music matches this concision perfectly; the whole thing lasts little more than an hour, which means that in performance every detail has to be carefully judged and exactly in place – and that all the music will, conveniently enough, just squeeze onto one record.