Word: banchetto
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...Banchetto Musicaie--Martin Pearlman, director, music of Handel; Sanders Theater...
...Banchetto Musicale--(see Saturday's listing...
...Poppea can still hold the stage -for all of its nearly four-hour length. Last week the Banchetto Musicale and the Boston Lyric Opera joined forces on a production that was as faithful to both the spirit and the notation of Monteverdi's score as one is likely to find. The opera was the high point of the Boston Early Music Festival and Exhibition, which brought musicologists, performers and instrument makers to the city for a week-long conference on the proper performance of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music. Abandoned now is the practice of booming Bach...
Foremost among these is Epstein's appropriation of Henry Purcell's score for The Fairy Queen, with chorus, soloists and instruments of the Banchetto Musicale, as a means both to lengthen and to enrich Shakespeare's play. The backhanded slap at Mendelssohn's romantic score, with its pianissimo fairies and ebullient wedding march, makes clear even before the lights go up the director's vision of A Midsummer Night's Dream: counterpoint over harmony. If the music doesn't bring that message home, Epstein has added a brief masque to accompany the overture: before a Paolo Uccello-like tapestry...
...same many-hued atmosphere as Epstein's staging. Unfortunately, it also introduces the only significant flaws in the Loeb production. The lyrics to Purcell's arias and choruses are often poetically inferior ot Shakespeare's verse, and sound rude, out of place. The stiff movements of singers from the Banchetto Musicale onto the stage--apparently to serve as a sort of Greek chorus as well as a musical one--has the same effect, clashing with the actors' finely choreographed and executed motions. The singers would be better off remaining where they begin, arranged antiphonally in front of both sides...