Purcell's Dido and Aeneas was long thought to have been composed for a girls' school in Chelsea. Recent scholarship, however, has suggested it may originally have been heard privately at the English court, and that its model was possibly one of the similar, small-scale works written for the French nobility for performance in an intimate setting. Charpentier's Actéon has sometimes been mooted as Purcell's prototype. That the two make an uncommonly fine double bill was proved at the Wigmore by Christian Curnyn and his Early Opera Company.

Curnyn is one of the few British conductors to insist on the greatness of the French Baroque, and his judgment of Charpentier's mix of sensual refinement and violence is wonderfully acute. There was shapely, detailed playing from his handful of instrumentalists, particularly the flutes, which initially introduce an erotic idyll that gradually turned murderous, then returned to mourn the slaughtered Actéon at the end. There was strong singing, too, above all from Ed Lyon, handsome yet suitably bewildered in the title role. His Diana, Claire Booth, was marginally more convincing in chaste pride than outrage. Hilary Summers was the awesome, implacable Juno, the embittered engineer of the entire tragedy.

All three returned after the interval for Dido and Aeneas, in which Booth made an elegant Belinda, Summers a very malign Sorceress and Lyon a suave, camp Spirit. Susan Bickley (replacing Anna Stéphany at short notice) was the immaculate, heartbreaking Dido, opposite Marcus Farnsworth's dithering if genuinely anguished Aeneas. The smallness of scale – with one player to each instrumental line – emphasised the profound sadness that pervades the entire score. A beautiful evening, every second of it.