Home | Reviews | Articles | Festivals | Competitions | Other | Contact Us
Google
WWW MUSICALPOINTERS

 

This World's Globe - Celebrating Shakespeare

(Musicians and Actors of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre)

Signum SIGCD077 - 2 CD Set

The Globe is one of London's great success stories. Its recreation has led to a revival of the original way that Shakespeare's plays were produced and is backed by scholarly reconstruction and study of all aspects of theatre in the early 17th century, with the Musicians of the Globe a constant presence.

Currently, there are splendid productions of two of the bloodiest plays, Shakespeare's Coriolanus & Titus Andronicus, the latter accompanied by as fine an array of ancient instruments including sonorous drums, serpent, and wind instruments as long as Swiss alphorns parading around the central area, with the public enlisted as crowd extras in the play and having to move to make way for the action.

Played as a black comedy, schoolchildren loved Titus Andronicus and some adults fainted at the most notorious of the gory scenes! Exhilarating.

This double CD is well conceived, the music and language of Shakespeare's time "sprinkled with sounds from London's Bankside, hooting riverboats and chatting 'playergoers' to recreate the enduring buzz of the Globe Theatre". The only pity is that more of it was not recorded on stage instead of in studio.

Full details at http://www.signumrecords.com/catalogue/sigcd077/index.htm

The Music of the Globe

Globe Editions, launched in 2008, has released a collection of tunes featured in Shakespeare's Globe productions - GE003.

These are good studio recordings, made at various London locations including Shakespeare's Globe itself, of instrumental music featured in the shows. They are given on copies of original instruments by a fine team of musicians, many of them well known in the early music field.

It is lavishly illustrated (sample page below) and will be an excellent souvenir for visitors to the shows there.



 


© Peter Grahame Woolf