Word: lutanists
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...outset of the show, a flutist, cellist and lutanist take their place in a far corner of the hall. They provide the accompaniment for two unspecified songs, followed by a dance (choreographed by Graciela Daniele) in which the white-masked members of the court all participate. We seem to be watching a traditional Twelfth Night masque. And all this preliminary music gives added point to the play's opening lines, in which Duke Orsino refers to the "excess" of music, to a "dying fall" (which is accurately fitted to a descending cadence), and finally requests a halt...
...half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike, Interstate 91, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Exit 32 or 31. Performances in the air-conditioned Theatre begin promptly at 2 and 8 p.m. There are free facilities for picnickers on the premises; and a vocal quartet, accompanied by a lutanist, perform Elizabethan madrigals in costume on the lawn prior to each performance...
Surprisingly, for a burly, blunt-talking child of the London slums, Guitarist-Lutanist Julian Bream seems to have eardrums as fragile as orchid petals. What he calls the "bloody row and chaos" of contemporary life-jangling telephones, whirring machinery, blaring car horns-can make him physically ill. He has been known to get off elevators before arriving at his floor because he found the "treacly tripe" of Muzak so grating. Dubbed "the Phantom" by musician friends because of his penchant for withdrawing into secluded rooms to commune with his gentle-speaking instruments, he would be happy to spend most...
Fresh Air. But the music world will not let him. At 34, Bream is in demand throughout Europe and America as the undisputed successor to the grand master of the classical guitar, Andres Segovia, and as a lutanist already beyond comparison. Without sacrificing stylistic elegance, he draws from both instruments the rustic grace and fresh-air feeling of the English countryside, redeeming them from sentimentality as well as musicological pedantry. To make up for the narrow dynamic range of the guitar, he achieves dramatic effects with an extraordinary variety of tonal colors. Subtle, jazzlike rhythms, throbbing chords, silvery lines, harplike...
...guitar's characteristic aplomb and lucidity. Best of all is his performance of Nocturnal, a 19-minute mood piece written especially for him in 1963 by Benjamin Britten. Spiraling through a set of variations that end rather than begin with the theme (Come, Heavy Sleep, a 1597 air by Lutanist-Composer John Dowland), Bream's guitar muses, churns restlessly, declaims, then drifts over the threshold of silence, leaving the final notes hanging in the air like wisps of smoke...