This was one of those evenings in the theatre you do not forget. Opera North has devised a double bill that is as original as it is seductive. Who would have thought to bring together Stravinsky’s ballet-cantata Les Noces and Purcell’s single, but brief, opera Dido and Aeneas? True, there is a common theme of marriage, rampant in the first, thwarted in the second, but this is hardly enough. Both works, too, are deeply involved with movement, the Purcell being dancey, and Les Noces intended for choreography. The Stravinsky is relatively infrequently staged in this way, however, and far more common as a concert piece; Dido has been choreographed at least once before, by Mark Morris. No, the link between the two was hard to describe – unless it be their sheer innovative genius – yet was palpably there. And the production by the choreographer Aletta Collins, designed by Giles Cadle, had the knack of imposing connections – through scenery, costume and movement – without forcing the issue.

On the contrary, the unity of the evening was a delight. It stemmed from a stimulating economy of means. Queen Dido’s Carthage was a basically bare stage, with a scattering of stones and a standing anthropoid figure, beneath a huge and colourfully changing moon. Les Noces, in the first half, had a similar bareness and moon, but the players, singers and conductor were positioned on and around a ziggurat into which human shapes had been cut. A troupe of 12 dancers weaved their way through both stagings as though the carriers of a timeless truth. In Les Noces, the girls were in dark dresses and the boys in dark trousers and grey shirts. In Dido, the men of the chorus adopted this latter costume, and for Dido’s death, the dancers – hitherto white-garbed sailor cohorts of Aeneas – reverted to them. Costumes (here by Gabrielle Dalton) are always a significant part of music theatre, but are rarely exploited with such simple adroitness.

The movements devised for Les Noces were invigorating – a sort of erotic gambolling – and included whole-body jumps that closely approximated levitation. The performance, under the musical direction of Nicholas Kok, with soloists including the tenor John Graham-Hall andthe soprano Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, went by in a flash. As these Russian wedding scenes are a kind of study in pure continuity, that was appropriate. The staging well conveyed the work’s vivid abstractionism.

Dido and Aeneas is hardly less miraculously sustained. Into barely an hour, it packs the substance of what feels like a full-scale opera, the sort one only wishes had established itself as an English tradition, instead of being supplanted by Handelian Italian opera thanks to Purcell’s untimely death. Instead of a slow frieze of da capo arias, we have the thrill of following Purcell’s instantaneous response to every syllable of Nahum Tate’s text. The action unfolds with a positively Wagnerian intimacy between words and music, but a concision surpassing even Puccini. There is no substitute for opera in your own language, no matter how talented a linguist you are. At Leeds, surtitles were avoided, for the Russian-language Stravinsky and certainly for the Purcell. The result was an authentically moving operatic experience.

It was all the more moving as it went on, following that devastating emotional trajectory to Dido’s chaconne lament and suicide. Susan Bickley’s assumption of the role was magnificent. Kok’s conducting ensured an uninsistent “period” lightness of touch and sureness of pace. The production has an intense elegance as well as a naked intensity. Adam Green was a fine Aeneas, Clarissa Meek a potent Sorceress. Opera North’s typically imaginative double bill is a credit to all involved.

In London, I attended the ninth Hampstead and Highgate Festival, which ended last night. The opening gala by the festival orchestra, under the festival director, George Vass, at St John-at-Hampstead, began with a Divertimento for String Orchestra commissioned from Hugh Wood, a local resident and 75 next month. With typically downright craftsmanship, he has produced three short movements whose economy and clarity are savourable in themselves, never mind the material. But that is good, too, and quasi-English. Since it was the conductor’s 50th birthday, seven composers supported by his festival (Wood among them) each wrote a variation on an oboe theme he penned in his twenties. From John McCabe’s whizzing capriccio to David Matthews’s closing fugue, the pianist Helen Reid dispatched them feelingly.

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