Word: mab
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...OTHER TWO WORKS. Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, and Dello Joio's To St. Cecilia, were surpassingly unremarkable. The only marginally interesting section of the Britten piece, which uses a problemmatical Auden text, was a Queen Mab Scherzo passage affording relief from the "flickering flames" of "Blonde Aphrodite." The unidentified soprano soloist thrilled us with another seismic performance whose beauty might be compared to an autumnal wheat field methodically bending to the breeze. Mr. Dello Joio, whose star has been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically...
Equally impressive is John McEnery, 25, who plays Mercutio not as a witty, lascivious buffoon but as a possessed genius who has lounged too long with his inferiors. His delivery of the Queen Mab speech is a masterpiece of abstracted art. Teetering on madness, he spouts the words as if emerging from a lifelong nightmare. Zeffirelli, however, seems to have had better luck in casting youth than age. Pat Heywood's Nurse is a cockney caricature. And Milo O'Shea's Friar Laurence is a characterization lost somewhere in the middle distance, not deeply enough involved with...
...combining these with readings from the play. Mr. Manusevitch had obviously rehearsed this wonderful music thoroughly; except for some wretched brass playing in an andante section, all of the movements were well done. The speakers were also good, particularly Daniel Seltzer, who read an opening chorus, Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, and some of Friar Laurence's best lines. Lynn Milgrim Phillips made a charming Juliet, and Paul Schmidt an adequate Romeo, though his relentless theatricality became a bit tiresome...
Working with Technician Otto Post, he put together an intricate array of glassware that looks like a crystal pipe organ for Queen Mab's palace. It makes no music, but clicks monotonously every 30 to 120 seconds when it tilts to pour off some of its mixture. This C.C.D. machine works on the principle of liquid-liquid extraction: two substances are not likely to be equally soluble in two different solvents. And if the solvents are not soluble in each other, they can be separated. Whatever is dissolved in them will be separated also...
Both Smithers and Landau should be made to listen to the Queen Mab vocal scherzetto and orchestral scherzo from Berlioz' "dramatic symphony" Romeo and Juliet before Smithers sets foot on the Festival stage again. In fact, no director should essay this play until he has studied all of the Berlioz masterpiece, the only work based on Shakespeare's play that surpasses the original. Significantly, in his Sunday appraisal of this production, the New York Times' Brooks Atkinson was also moved to invoke the Berlioz work. Although he made some inaccurate statements about both Berlioz and his symphony, his basic point...