Word: britten
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...also the best place to set one. A Midsummer Night's Dream is at once a producer of magical events and a product of the wood outside Athens where it occurs. Shakespeare wrote about mortals and spirits tangled in a complicated web of deception and enchantment. In Benjamin Britten's operatic version of the play the twinings of reality and illusion combine to confuse all the wanderers in the wood. The fairies bewitch the mortals and each other, the mortals get lost and easily fall prey to the fairies' spells. But all, human and immortal alike, are animated...
Across the street, meanwhile, at Lowell House, Puck is also recognizing mortals for fools. Song is the key note here with Benjamin Britten's full-scale opera of A Midsummer Night's Dream being staged in all its glory. Performances also begin tonight and run through Saturday at 8:30 p.mm...
...sensitivity with which the orchestra performed Benjamin Britten's Suite on English Folk Tunes carried through most of the concert. The suite, in three parts, was delivered in all its interesting orchestration, especially in the dialogues between the timpani and the winds, and in the passages in which the strings play while the remaining players are silent...
...Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra's concert Saturday night was a relatively good performance of an intriguing program that could have been played in just a slightly more inspired fashion. The orchestra, under conductor Yames Yannatos, gave a generally spirited performance of Britten, Gershwin and Mussorgsky. Soloist John Melnyk's performance of the Gershwin Piano Concerto in F was a fine combination of control and verve which highlighted the evening. But the feeling and dynamic playing which a work such as "Pictures at an Exhibition" can evoke even in its less energetic passages did not always appear in what otherwise...
...conveyed the lilting melodies convincingly, although they sometimes sounded muddy. The restrained notes of the strings in "Hankin Booby" constrasted interestingly with the sudden intrusions of the tympani; the orchestra's evocative and controlled playing in this second part was particularly fine and beautiful. The lyrical elegance which suffuses Britten's work appeared most notably in the last part, "Hunt the Squirrel," in which conductor Yannatos had the players emphasize nicely the passages of the strings vying against each other...