Word: harping
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Hark, the Harp. Chicago owes its blues eminence largely to an accident of geography. Practically alone among Northern cities, it has absorbed a steady stream of migrant Negroes from Mississippi, where a fertile folk tradition of spirituals, ballads, work songs and field hollers nourishes the blues the way the rich soil of the Delta sprouts cotton. The result is that all the Chicago blues are shot through with the raw purity of emotion, the lyricism and rhythmic subtlety of the Mississippi country style. Now a whole generation of younger performers have added technical polish and a hard driving sound that...
Brutus' young page Lucius is the only character Shakespeare did not find in Plutarch, and he was invented chiefly to illustrate Brutus' considerateness of others. Fifteen-year-old Alan Howard plays him ardently and appealingly. When he falls asleep in the midst of singing and plucking his harp, Brutus affectionately covers him with a gown. When, after the battle at Philippi, Lucius is carried in, lain on the ground and tenderly shrouded in a blanket, one is more moved than by the death of any of the play's principals...
...Brutus, Tharon Musser's eerie lighting makes it quite unnecessary to add the off-stage roll on the cymbal. And must we have another crude cymbal roll when Brutus runs on his sword? As a background to the aura of death at Philippi, Susa has also introduced on the harp an ostinato pattern from the Dies irae plainchant, which recalls the identical ostinato near the end of Rachmaninoff's tone-poem Isle of the Dead. At any rate, I suspect that even Sousa would have done better than Susa
...several solo songs. Conrad Susa's music is a mishmash of styles. "O mistress mine," accompanied by bells, suffered from Mathews' inability to sing on pitch. At the opening performance he did better with "Come away, death," a quite lovely piece accompanied by two oboes and a harp. He is allowed to end the show as Shakespeare wrote it, singing "When that I was" all alone on stage. The lights go down, stars come out on a dark blue cyclorama, and Mathews punctuates his five verses with the tintinnabulation of tiny finger-bells. The effect is charming. How much more...
...active. John Duffy's opening A-minor music for brass, cymbals and kettledrums smacks too much of a Near East movie spectacular, but the later rustic music, in the traditional rustic key of F-major, is much better. When a lutenist appears on stage, though, we hear a harp; couldn't it at least be a guitar...