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While we are clearly having a bit of trouble in the UK with the standard models of national and touring opera, for the local and 'pro-am' variety I defy anyone to challenge the English. Companies like Blackheath Halls Opera, New Sussex Opera, Surrey Opera, Dorset Opera – even Birmingham Opera in a bigger way – have been making this model work rather brilliantly for decades. And now there’s another county in the game. Somerset Opera has actually been going for 50 years (see the last issue of Opera Now) but the company is being reborn under its new Chair, Helena Payne, and this Dido is I guess the first fruits of the new order.

And it was genuinely joyous and impressive, by any standards – not just the ones you bring to 15-quid-a-ticket shows. They could easily have got away with a standard, smooth-edged performance of a piece often presented as cosily familiar, and it’s greatly to everyone’s credit that they dared to try something a little edgier. Nothing to really scare the horses, mind you, but a punchy, thought-through and properly tragic Dido – unafraid to look for humour and humanity in a piece of the most concentrated genius that is too often tossed off as a mimsy, mannered miniature.

Somerset Opera's production of Dido and Aeneas at the Museum of Somerset | Photo credit: Edward J Felton

First up, this was performed on a sort of catwalk (audience either side) in the narrowish main hall of the Museum of Somerset, at one end of which lies the big, 4^th-century Low Ham Mosaic, unearthed in the ’30s, which relates Dido’s tragedy in strip-cartoon form. There’s a real frisson in telling the story beside this local representation of it made when the tale was already ancient, a palpable feeling of vaulting ages, the archaic and ageless continuity, with Dido and co springing into physical life beside these pictures.

And Guido Martin Brandis’s fresh staging emphasised how very English Purcell and Tate’s version is too: that rained-off picnic, those pantomime witches, Belinda, for God’s sake. There was real human substance to characters who can feel one-dimensional: Bethan Terry’s sparky Belinda, nudging moody Dido (Leila Zanette) towards what she wants, and a rare Aeneas (Kieran Rayner) with a bit of charisma and sex-appeal. Sure, Purcell fast-forwards the love story, even by operatic standards, but this felt immediate, playful, true, and gave the piece a proper shape as the light-heartedness turns to tragedy and grief.

Somerset Opera's production of Dido and Aeneas at the Museum of Somerset | Photo credit: Edward J Felton

A couple of neat dramatic touches, too, with attention paid to Tate’s tightly-wound words: ‘Oft she visits this lone mountain’ delivered by Amy Carson as a premonition of disaster – that final line always sounds rather panicky to me – and this tricky moment then defused by Aeneas with an actual joke (you don’t get many of those in Dido) before he is waylaid by masked 'Macbethy' witches delivering the gods’ decree in creepy overlapping phrases.

At one end of the hall, the composer Noah Mosley led – from his neatly decorative harpsichord – a tiny but excellent and expressive band from the Taunton Sinfonietta: two violins, viola, cello and bass, with Chris Hirst playing the mandora (a nine-stringed lute) in a forceful performance that was only a bit ponderous in the occasional chorus – no doubt for crowd-control in this tricky space. That amateur chorus, Somerset Opera’s backbone, was terrifically good, though, well schooled by Brandis (and dance-consultant Shona Morris) to cover a lot of dramatic bases.

The young principals were admirable, musical, dramatic and characterful, with the elegant mezzo Ms Zanette a really wonderful, big-voiced Dido, going from dignified but puppyish lovebird to her magnificent (but self-destroying) slighted fury with real conviction: richly sung and enacted, she is a magnetic performer. Watch out for her and this company: ambitions are high, this is a great new start, and they are planning a Turn of the Screw in winter.

Dido and Aeneas ran from 10-12 July | more info here.