Word: text
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only trouble is that the thunder sheets and other off-stage sound effects are so loud throughout that the sixty-odd lines of text are almost wholly unintelligible. It would be wiser to use a much lower decibel setting, with a final crescendo at the actual foundering...
...marriage festivities of the daughter of James I), Ray Diffen has provided lovely gold-haloed costumes for the goddesses Iris, Ceres and Juno, who sing a terzetto by John Morris and oversee a pretty ballet of nymphs choreographed by Kathryn Posin (though Freedman has needlessly abridged the text in order to extend the singing and dancing--needlessly, since only The Comedy of Errors is shorter, and this production has a running-time of only two and a quarter hours...
...Tempest takes place in a single afternoon on an island in Bermuda (as the text itself informs us), which lay unsettled until Sir George Gowers and his crew were shipwrecked on its coast in 1609. Several accounts of the expedition and wreck circulated in England the next year, and these provided Shakespeare with much of his material. The dramatist, in order to make the island a way station between Africa and Naples, simply transferred his Bermuda from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean...
...Morton (whom Bostonians will remember for his central role of Mr. Geeter in the long television series Watch Your Mouth, shown last year on WGBH) is giving the one outstanding performance in the current Tempest. With the splotchy face and long nails referred to in the text, Morton has worked out a fully rounded characterization. He crawls on his belly, he walks with a special bow-legged gait, and he indulges in puling vowels and animalistic exhalations of spleen. He knows how to emphasize the explosive consonants with which the dramatist peppered his part, and he displays a splendid singing...
...Haydn's other major oratorio, structurally less cohesive and dramatically less powerful than The Creation, but a work in which the aging composer set out to demonstrate all that he could do in a wide range of styles and forms. In other words, a compendium of glories. The text, from James Thomson's panoramic poem written in 1730, inspires passages of musical landscape painting, evocations of the hunt, human scenes of yeomen plowing, spinning, drinking. Dorati is a knowing and devoted Haydn conductor, as he showed in his heroic compilation of all 104 symphonies with the Philharmonia Hungarica...