Word: hathaways
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...face of it, conductor Daniel Hathaway seemed to have limited his ambition to a formal concert performance without dialogue. Actually he failed to resist the temptation of doing Fidelio as a stage production as well...
...doing he combined the worst of both alternatives. Bass David Ripley kept the audience informed with bits of plot summary between musical numbers. Fidelio's typical rescue-opera plot was ridiculous distilled into narrative prose and recited with a straight face. Furthermore, Hathaway had his soloists marching on and off stage, simulating the enrtances and exits of a stage performance. These movements were ill-planned, ill-timed and meaningless...
...level of performance Friday night was generally high. The pick-up orchestra had its tentative moments but was otherwise enthusiastic and attentive. Soprano Dorothy Crawford and pianist Daniel Hathaway gave an excellent rendition of six Ives songs, and there were outstanding performances by David Archibald, clarinet, and D. Allan Shewmon, piano. The height of the evening was the massive Piano Trio (1904-1911), whose second movement bears the indication "TSIAJ" ("This Scherzo is a Joke"). This is one of those pieces that has to be heard live to be appreciated. The sight and sound of Shewmon and 'cellist Fran Uitti...
More annoying was Hathaway's conducting. He is by far the most extravagant conductor at Harvard. Flam-boyance is all right if it corresponds to what the orchestra is doing, but Hathaway's gestures were for the most part superflous and asked for momentous musical events where they were not called for. He did show an uncanny instinct for pace, but his excellent section leaders should share credit for this. On the whole, he behaved as though he were conducting a mammoth Romantic orchestra like the Berlin Philharmonic, in blatant contradiction to the classical and chamber-like possibilities...
That program was designed to take advantage of the orchestra's size, but it also tended to expose the orchestra's weaknesses and shortcomings. Had Hathaway been more sensitive to the real potential of his orchestra, there might have been some fine results. As it was, the Bach society's performance--energetic, amateurish, on top of the music as much as laboring under its weight--was Harvard music at its most typical, if not at its best...