Purcell's 350th

How to celebrate landmarks and anniversaries of great composers? Recycle the old classics or shine the spotlight on hidden gems?
According to Neil Fisher in The Times: "But if the celebrations for Purcell's 350th birthday year are being firmly pegged to his most familiar and best-loved creation, Dido and Aeneas, then this old warhorse is being newly shod. This spring brings two new productions of Purcell's Dido, and the styles couldn't be more different. In the blue corner, the Royal Ballet's resident choreographer, Wayne McGregor, who has persuaded the Royal Opera House to unite its opera and ballet wings for a Purcell and Handel double bill (the Handel half is the composer's one-act Acis and Galatea). And in the red, contemporary theatre's great experimentalist, Katie Mitchell, whose After Dido is not so much a presentation of Purcell's opera as a conceptual response to it.