A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 64, Act I: "Welcome wanderer!" - "I know a bank" | Benjamin Britten, text from William Shakespeare
Iestyn Davies, countertenor; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; James Conlon
Welcome wanderer! Hast thou the flower there?
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding, nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses and with eglantine.
There sleeps Tytania, sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances, dances and delight.
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough, weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes
And make her full of hateful, hateful fantasies, of fantasies.
Take thou some of it, and seek through this grove.
A sweet Athenian lady is in love
With a disdainful youth. Anoint his eyes,
But do it when the next thing he espies
May be the lady. Thou shalt know the man
By the Athenian garments he hath on.
i finally extracted this aria from my *cough*pirated*cough* audio recording of the 2013 met amnd because i wanted to be able to listen to My Favorite Part without having to do a drop-the-needle test on the entire 2.5hr recording every single time :) and i am sharing it with all of you because i love u :)
i feel like most recordings with divided tracks start from the horn fermata but dramatically i wanted the puck trumpet-and-drum included before, for oberon to be reacting to, right? even though the trumpet entrance is slightly cut off here because it overlapped with oberon's previous note. also now you can hear the solo trumpet flub that one note every time 0:)
also, yes, i recognize that i ended this clip on the dominant and yes, that is on purpose to torture musicians yes, that is on purpose to recruit people to my pressure campaign for the met to fucking release this recording for purchase, preferably on dvd no, that wasn't exactly my intention, but once the magic chords in the strings start there's no good place to cut the recording and then it transitions smoothly into the mechanicals' trombone so i chopped it right on the barline before they enter. sorry not sorry, no tonic for you!
James Conlon is an American conductor. He is currently the music director of Los Angeles Opera and principal conductor of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra.
James Conlon, direttore musicale dell’Opera di Los Angeles, e l’Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini dalla notte all’alba in concerto
RAVELLO (SA) – Il Concerto all’alba è diventato oramai un vero e proprio rito. Al Ravello Festival, come da tradizione, il passaggio dalla notte al giorno in musica è atteso da un numero sempre crescente di appassionati e, per questo, sempre più ambito.
Le norme…
