BARD DAY

posted by James Reel

Barack Obama presented his legal birth certificate for all to see three years ago. William Shakespeare would not be able to do the same. There's no record of his birth, although there is a baptismal record, dated April 26, 1654. It was customary to baptize a child three days after birth, so we can guess at his birth date, but all we have for sure is his baptismal date, and that's why we're devoting April 26 entirely to music inspired by Shakespeare.

We have at least two days' worth of Shakespeare music in the KUAT-FM library, so I arbitrarily decided to feature all the music we have associated with select plays (and a few sonnets), and save the other plays for another year. We'll begin at 6 a.m. with that lighthearted trifle Macbeth as treated musically by Verdi, Sullivan (of Gilbert-and fame) and others. After the 7:01 news we'll check in briefly with The Taming of the Shrew before moving smartly along to As You Like It (scores by Walton and others). After the 8:01 news it's a Coriolanus overture--Castelnuovo-Tedesco's, not Beethoven's, which is not related to the Shakespeare play. And then, it's hour after hour of Romeo and Juliet, including Prokofiev's complete ballet score on that subject, the Berlioz "dramatic symphony" inspired by the play, a certain Tchaikovsky concert overture, the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein's West Side Story (the R&J story moved to 1950s New York City), and stray pieces by the likes of Svendsen, Bellini, Diamond, Delius, Lyatoshinsky, Kabalevsky, Gounod and even Liszt. That segment will stretch all the way to 4 p.m. After that, it's a close encounter with Sir John Falstaff, dalliance with a few other works, and finally a look at A Midsummer Night's Dream courtesy of Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Satie, Purcell and, of course, Mendelssohn.