A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Autumn, at Oberlin: Benjamin Britten’s Opera will be Staged by Oberlin Opera Theater November 14-18

OBERLIN, OHIO (October 17, 2007) — Since it opened on the British stage in 1960, Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a feast for the senses and a deliciously wicked comedy, has captivated opera lovers. The Oberlin production of this magnificent opera opens on Wednesday, November 14, at 8 p.m. in Oberlin College’s Hall Auditorium, located at 67 N. Main Street on Route 58, between the Oberlin Inn and the Allen Memorial Art Museum. With a libretto adapted from Shakespeare’s play by Britten and Peter Pears, the opera, sung in English, is in three acts with two intermissions.

The Oberlin Chamber Orchestra will perform under the direction of Bridget-Michaele Reischl, Music Director of the Oberlin Orchestras and Associate Professor of Conducting. Stage direction will be by Jonathon Field, Associate Professor of Opera Theater and Director of Opera Theater Productions at Oberlin.

A special treat for audiences will be the appearance of 10 children from the Oberlin Choristers, who will sing and perform as fairies in the opera’s magical wood. The Oberlin Choristers is a community-based choral program for children who are in pre-school through the 12th grade. The youngsters were prepared for their operatic debut by Katherine Plank, Founder and Artistic Director of the ensemble.

Performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, November 14, 16, and 17; with a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, November 18.Tickets are $5 for all students; $8 for Oberlin College faculty, staff, alumni, parents, area educators, and seniors; and $12 for the general public. All seats are reserved. Tickets are $3 more when purchased at the door. Call Oberlin’s Central Ticket Service, located in the lobby of Hall Auditorium, at 440-775-8169 or 800-371-0178. Box office hours are from noon to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday and select Saturdays. Hall Auditorium is wheelchair accessible, and hearing enhancement is available upon request. Free parking is available throughout the campus.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sponsored by the Oberlin Conservatory of Music’s Opera Theater program through generous support from the Louis C. Sudler Fund. It is produced by arrangement with Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., publisher and copyright owner, in cooperation with the Oberlin College Theater and Dance Program.

Synopsis and Director’s Notes

Benjamin Britten has transformed Shakespeare’s play about the madness of love into a sprightly, comic opera flush with fairies. Oberon, King of the Fairies, has quarreled with his wife, Queen Tytania, in a wood near Athens. He sends his spirit attendant, Puck, on an errand: find the magical herb, the juice of which, when dropped on a sleeping person’s eyelids, causes her to fall in love with the next live creature she sees. Lovers requited but thwarted (Lysander and Hermia) and unrequited (Demetrius and Helena)—not to mention a group of amateur thespians, including one put-upon weaver named Bottom—populate this enchanted world, and the magic plant that Puck has found is employed to confusing and comical effect.

“Britten is brilliant with word and picture ‘painting’ in this opera, with its timeless magic,” says Bridget-Michaele Reischl. “Faithful to Shakespeare in the storytelling, Britten musically pays subtle homage to the Renaissance and baroque styles of music. He uses a harpsichord, harp, and metallic percussion instruments—with few strings or winds, all of which create a magical fairy quality. As the worlds of royalty and fairies collide in the story, the orchestration perfectly exhibits the magic. Talk about a ‘feel-good’ opera!” Reischl is enthused about the uniquely small orchestra of 20 student musicians who will perform in the opera. “This is an intimate playing experience and as close to a chamber ensemble as it gets,” she says.

Performers and Production Team

This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream features Oberlin Conservatory students. Some of them are double-cast in the principal roles and alternate performances;  one cast appears on Wednesday and Saturday, and the other on Friday and Sunday. The Fairies include King Oberon (Nathan Medley ’09), Queen Tytania (Olivia Savage ’08, Jenna Hall ’08), Puck (Amy O’Callaghan ’08), Cobweb (Caitlin Bell ’10), Peaseblossom (Laura Estrada ’08), Mustardseed (Melanie Emig ’09), and Moth (Meris Gadaleto ’10). The Lovers include Helena (Sophie Wingland ’08, Tiffany Marx ’08), Hermia (Kimiko Glynn ’08, Jordan Roberts ’09), Lysander (Benjamin von Reiche ’10, Joseph Turro ’09), Demetrius (Jeffrey Hill ’08, Evan Bennett ’08), Theseus (Joseph Lattanzi ’10), and Hippolyta (Maureen Sutliff ’08). The Mechanicals include Bottom (Joseph Barron ’08), Flute (Chad Grossman ‘10), Snout (Elias Traverse ’08), Starveling (Colin Levin ’08), Quince (Jason Eck ’08), and Snug (Douglas Balkin ’09). Servants are performed by Kjirsti Petersen Foutz ’08 and Mark Tempesta ’09. Children from the Oberlin Choristers appear as the Chorus.

The Oberlin production team of professional staff includes Alan Montgomery, assistant music director; Howard Lubin, musical preparation; Katherine Plank, choir director; Michael Louis Grube, managing director and set designer; Holly Handman-Lopez, choreographer; Copeland Woodruff, assistant director and stage manager; Jeremy K. Benjamin, lighting designer; Chris Flaharty, costume designer; JoEllen Cuthbertson, costumer; Daniel Michalak, rehearsal accompanist; Joseph P. Natt, technical director; Andrew Kaletta, master electrician; David Bugher, assistant technical director; Chris Haff-Paluck, orchestral manager and librarian; and Robert Katkowsky is properties master. Jayson Greenberg ‘09 is student assistant stage manager.

Benjamin Britten

Born in Suffolk, England, in 1913, Benjamin Britten began composing at the age of seven. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London, writing the first compositions that would win him acclaim—the Sinfonietta, Op. 1, and A Boy was Born—in 1934. The following year he met poet W.H. Auden, with whom he collaborated on Our Hunting Fathers, a song-cycle for soprano and orchestra. In 1936, Britten met tenor Peter Pears, with whom he began a musical collaboration and personal partnership that would last for the rest of his life.

In 1939, Britten and Pears followed W.H. Auden to America, where Britten composed Paul Bunyan, his first opera. He also wrote other important works, such as the orchestral Sinfonia da Requiem. Conscientious objectors during World War II, Britten and Pears returned to England in 1942, and Britten began composing an opera, Peter Grimes, which would catapult him to prominence as the pre-eminent composer of his generation. The duo increasingly became an important part of post-war Britain’s cultural life, helping to found the English Opera Group in 1946. Britten was celebrated not only as a composer, but also as an accompanist and an authoritative conductor. His interpretations of Mozart were highly esteemed.

Following Grimes, Britten wrote other operas, including Billy Budd and Turn of the Screw. He later became interested in the music of the East, as well as in Japanese Noh plays. Then, in 1959, Britten began to compose a full-evening opera for the reopening of the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh. With little time to create a new libretto, he and Pears adapted A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Shakespeare’s play. What resulted was one of the most successful and faithful operatic adaptations of a Shakespearean play that has ever been produced. Said Britten about the element of fantasy in the play and opera: “The Fairies are very different from the innocent nothings that often appear in productions. I have always been struck by a kind of sharpness in Shakespeare’s fairies …they are the guards to Tytania, so they have in places martial music.”

With dynamic action between the different groups of characters, and the richly woven tapestry of keyboards and percussion representing the fairy world, warm strings for the lovers, and bright, percussive harps, A Midsummer Night’s Dream became the most beguiling of Britten’s operas. Its timeless humor and fairy enchantment make it a spellbinding masterpiece.

Note: This biographical information was gathered from The Britten-Pears Foundation (www.brittenpears.org).

Bridget-Michaele Reischl

Bridget-Michaele is Music Director of the Oberlin Orchestras and Associate Professor of Conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.  In 2005-06, she led the Oberlin Conservatory Symphony Orchestra on a concert tour of China. Since becoming the first American to win Italy’s Antonio Pedrotti International Conducting Competition in 1995, she has been an active guest conductor throughout the United States and internationally, appearing with such orchestras as the Atlanta and Milwaukee symphonies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Reischl is also music director of the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a position she has held since 2001. From 1992 to 2004, she was Music Director of the Lawrence Symphony Orchestra and Associate Professor of Conducting at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music. As a student of Robert Spano (a 1983 Oberlin graduate), she continued her studies as a conducting fellow at both the Aspen and the Tanglewood music festivals, where she worked with Seiji Ozawa, Murray Sidlin, and David Zinman (also an Oberlin graduate, Class of 1958). She has recorded on the Velut Luna, CRI, and Sea Breeze Record Company labels. Reischl is scheduled to record a new release of Debussy and Takemitsu on the Telarc label with the internationally acclaimed harpist, Yolanda Kondonassis (Oberlin Assistant Professor of Harp), in January 2008.  She will return to Italy in the summer of 2008 to conduct Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro as part of the “Oberlin in Italy” program.

Jonathon Field is one of America’s more versatile and popular stage directors, having directed more than 100 productions in all four corners of the United States. He served as Artistic Director of Lyric Opera Cleveland for six seasons, where he presented the operas of Mozart, Rossini, and Donizetti as well as the Ohio premieres of works by John Adams, Mark Adamo, and Philip Glass. Field’s productions for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, among them Trouble in Tahiti, Gianni Schicchi, The Old Maid and the Thief and The Spanish Hour, were so successful they were repeated at the Illinois Humanities Festival with Stephen Sondheim as keynote speaker. His productions of La Cenerentola and Die Fledermaus for San Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theatre played in more than 20 states, as has an updated version of La Bohème for Seattle Opera. In addition to the standard Italian and German repertoire, he has directed Eugene Onegin and BorisGodunov in the original Russian in San Francisco; he had a great critical success there as well with Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. Over the past eight years Field has directed 10 productions with the Arizona Opera, being deemed by the press “their most perceptive stage director,” and working there with such esteemed artists as Teresa Zylis-Gara, Jerome Hines, Pablo Elvira, Giorgio Tozzi, and Angelina Reux.

Field’s versatility extends from the avant garde to musical comedies. He successfully introduced computer-generated scenery to the world of opera in a recent San Francisco production of Candide that the press called “virtual Voltaire—the backgrounds are as varied as the story.” His pioneering use of video-projected scenery in productions of The Turn of the Screw, Tales of Hoffmann, and Der Freischütz has elicited praise from audience and critics alike. In the realm of operetta and musicals he has staged H.M.S. Pinafore for Opera Omaha, Trial by Jury for Lake George Opera, Bernstein’s Wonderful Town in Chicago, and Merry Widow and Countess Maritza in San Francisco. For the Oakland Symphony he translated and choreographed Stravinsky’s Pulcinella using members of the Oakland Ballet. He has worked on several world premieres, most notably assisting Robert Altman with Bolcom’s McTeague at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and David Alden with Susa’s The Love of Don Perlimplin with San Francisco Opera. He has also worked as Assistant Director for several of Seattle Opera’s Wagner Ring cycles, and he has served in an administrative capacity with many opera companies and festivals. In February 2007, Field directed—at Oberlin and at Miller Theatre in New York City—the U.S. premiere of Lost Highway, the dramatic music theater work by noted Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth based on the David Lynch film. The opera received critical acclaim from the New York Times and musicalamerica.com, which made special reference to Field’s direction.

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