By Neil Fisher, Touring [Times Online, 17 October 2006]

THIS is a company that is never short of ambition, no matter what its bank manager might say. And this autumn English Touring Opera’s no doubt meagre resources are being stretched further than ever in a festival celebrating the Baroque. It began with the world’s first indisputably great opera, Monteverdi’s Orfeo; now it continues with an English icon, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, alongside Carissimi’s oratorio, Jephte.