Format : Score and Parts
SKU: HL.49002518
ISBN 9790220120466. UPC: 073999913347. 9.0x12.0x1.015 inches. English.
Like few other theatre worksThe Magic Flute, A Midsummer Night's DreamTippett's first opera creates a wholly other place, one where human actions can be seen as in a tilted mirror. Since this is indeed an opera, the place, or dreamspace, is conjured by music: by luminescent music that, in its flowing abundance, radiant harmonies and evocative wind colourings, represents the natural world within which the characters have to integrate themselves. The central couple, those whose marriage is at first subverted and then gloriously celebrated, are Mark and Jenifer: he a young man of the earth and the senses, she a young woman of lofty spirituality. Each is only half a person, and before they can be united they have to be made whole, have to find within themselves an understanding of the other. Overseeing their mythic initiation and psychic healing are two Ancients, votaries of a temple on a wooded hilltop.As in the Mozart precedent, which the composer certainly had in mind, there is also a more workaday couple, Jack and Bella. The other principals are Jenifer's businessman father King Fisher, who wants to stop the wedding for reasons of his own, and an Erda-like seer. There is also a dancer, Strephon, leading the exuberant ballet in which the orchestra completes the story of enlightenment and passion. It is ultimately a victory of love and, before love, self-knowledge.(Paul Griffiths).
SKU: PR.164002950
ISBN 9781491114568. UPC: 680160633449. 9 x 12 inches.
Dan Welcher’s fascinating work for soprano sax is both a refraction of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his own incidental music to Shakespeare’s comedy. The work’s title, AS LIGHT AS BIRD FROM BRIER, quotes from Oberon (King of the Fairies) invoking revelry at the play’s climactic wedding scene. Welcher’s fantasy skips among the most beloved themes of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer – giving the saxophonist quite a workout, and the listener a midsummer delight.AS LIGHT AS BIRD FROM BRIER is loosely based on Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has haunted me since I was nine years old. My parents subscribed me to The Children’s Record Guild, and every month a new 78rpm vinyl record would arrive in the mail. They were mostly fairy tales and “kids lit,†but in this case it was a very condensed performance of the actual play, with Mendelssohn’s music. I loved it immediately, and still do – I saw a performance in 2014 at the Stratford Festival that literally stalks my dreams.When I was commissioned by saxophonist Stephen Page to compose a work for soprano saxophone and piano two years later, I channeled Mendelssohn as an inspiration: specifically, the Overture, the Scherzo, the Intermezzo, the fairy’s song “You spotted snakes with double tongue,†and the Rustics’ Dance. But it’s not a pastiche – most of the music is completely my own, though attentive listeners will detect snatches of Mendelssohn’s haunting score throughout.This piece joins MILL SONGS and FLORESTAN’S FALCON among works honoring my favorite 19th-century composers (in those cases, Schubert and Schumann) without ripping them off. As Stravinsky did in his ballet Pulcinella, I have borrowed fragments of melody from a much-loved composer, and made a fabric of harmonies and scales that are genetically related to Mendelssohn, but unmistakably Welcher.In this work, the saxophonist is Puck – skittish, dazzlingly fast, and brilliant in the outer parts, and a mischievous Cupid in the long, central Love Song. (Remember how Puck anoints Titania’s eyes with the juice from a magic flower, which causes her to fall in love with Bottom the weaver, who has been bewitched and wears a donkey’s head?) The music traces Puck’s magic flight, the finding of the flower, Titania’s love-scene with Bottom and her fairies, and the rustic players – whose rehearsal of the funniest play-within-the-play in literature is interrupted by Puck’s dirty tricks.I greatly enjoyed the process of writing this piece, and often found myself quite moved even as I was writing it... which rarely happens. Stephen Page, who commissioned the work, is a consummate artist (and a bit of a Puck himself). The title comes from Oberon’s final speech in the play:Through the house, give glimmering light,By the dead and drowsy fire.Every elf and fairy spriteHop as light as bird from brier,And this ditty, after me,Sing, and dance it trippingly.
