The Lindsay Kemp Company - A Midsummer Night's Dream (Remastered) (1988/2023) [Official Digital Download 24/48]

“A Midsummer Night's Dream” was born in Rome; it was autumn of the year 1978. After ten years of perfecting and revising the score throughout the various voyages of this show to more than ten countries, covering all continents, I conceived the definitive album of "Dream" with Luca Mainardi during the autumn of 1987 in Barcelona and then it was put together under the general production of Giulio Cesare Ricci in January 1988, in London. It was then a process of recapturing the best moments, ideas and remnants of recordings and voice-over effects from the past, mixed with other totally new for the first and last time. (Carlos Miranda)

What is a dream? We used the word in a hundred everyday contexts to represent something otherwise indescribable, something "unreal" that contains the most powerful reality, that compels us to believe in it, even to realize it. I have always had a compulsion to make my dreams real, not to put them in the category of unreal thing. This happens with the dreams I dream when I am asleep, which affect me vividly all day and which I try to give reality in the theatre. All my theatre is an attempt to make the spectator dream, to stimulate those levels of awareness where we are more than we ordinarily realize. Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream" is a celebration of the power of the subconscious, the magical, the kingdom of dreams and its confusing and enrichening relationship with every-day life. This is what drew me to the play and this, the aspect of it that Carlos Miranda, David Haughton and I wished to emphasize in our free adaptation for our company. Shakespeare worked his magic through the texture of language: the vocabulary of our poetry on the other hand, creates its textures through the senses, through dance, gesture, image and of course, music. Even without the theatrical counterpart to which it is married, Carlos Miranda's music on its own summons up Shakespeare's sensual, comical, dionisian, magical dream as I see it and as he hears it. This is why I am so happy that people have the chance, by listening to this record, to dream with us. I'm happy too that the record is dedicated to Michael Matou, who made the role of Oberon/Theseus his own, so brilliantly extreme and out of this world that he seemed only possible as a dream. Now he has left us and has become pure dream. May him, may we all, with this music dream richly. (Lindsay Kemp)

Tracklist
01. Prologue
02. Scherzo
03. Parade: The changeling’s song
04. Hail mortal: Titania’s song
05. Moon-light scene
06. Court dances: blind man’s buff – Spanish dance
07. The mechanics rehearsing – storm “…Love in idleness…”
08. The lover's awaken
09. Lullaby (From Mendelssohn’s “Song with chorus”)
10. Trasformation of bottom into a beast and orgy in the woods
11. Nocturne
12. “Playscene…” A merry and tragical scene
13. Finale