"Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 128 is about a lover who is jealous of the musical instruments that a beautiful woman is playing. He wishes he were the strings under her fingers." Cellist and Close Encounters with Music artistic director Yehuda Hanani is describing the inspiration for the world premiere that will form the centerpiece of the organization’s annual spring concert next Saturday at Tanglewood. Composer Kenji Bunch has set the sonnet for narrator, cello, and percussion to suggest the many ways the beloved’s fingers might "touch, stroke, and pluck" her instruments — or her lover. Hanani continues, "The piece, ‘ . . . When Music Play’st upon That Blessed Wood,’ has an Elizabethan quality, but it sounds a little pentatonic, too."
Called "Measure for Measure: Shakespeare in Music," the concert will feature chamber music inspired by Shakespeare, What’s more, it’ll star Sigourney Weaver: the actress will narrate the Bunch piece and read the English translations of Shakespearean texts set in other languages. Hanani, percussionist Chris Vatalaro, baritone William Sharp, soprano Jennifer Aylmer, and pianist Eliran Avni will complete the line-up of performers.
The format is characteristic of Close Encounters’ efforts to "bring listeners closer to the experience" by linking music to the other arts. "Because general music education is not what it used to be, you can’t introduce music with technical terms," explains Hanani from London, where he’s giving master classes. "You can’t talk about sonata form or resolution of the diminished seventh chord." So in its monthly concerts during the fall and winter in the Berkshires (the group usually performs in Great Barrington’s St. James Church, as well as in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, and Scottsdale, Arizona), Close Encounters frequently resorts to a "framing experience" like the Shakespeare concert. Over the course of more than 60 programs, the organization has explored such topics as composers’ reactions to traumatic events (including the "nihilistic and religious" responses of Shostakovich and Messiaen) and the "relation between mental illness and creativity." At the latter concert, Hanani reports gleefully, there were many psychiatrists and mental health workers in the audience, and heated discussions broke out at the post-concert reception.
Close Encounters has also made a point of commissioning new works, both for its adult concerts and for its children’s programs. Last year composer Osvaldo Golijov wrote a setting of Emily Dickinson’s "How Slow the Wind" that soprano Dawn Upshaw sang in the spring Tanglewood concert. And the young Boston composer Matthew Guerrieri wrote a children’s piece based on the 15th-century Chinese fable "The Monkey King."
For "Measure for Measure," Hanani has tried to select music from the Bard’s time to the present. There will be an arrangement of a passacaglia by Thomas Tallis, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, then works by Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert as well as Richard Strauss’s Three Ophelia Songs ("a fascinating portrait of madness"), and Berlioz’s "La mort d’Ophélie," ("in which Queen Gertrude describes Ophelia’s death by drowning"). Hanani will perform Vaughan Williams’s Six Studies in English Folk-Song, and Weaver will conclude the evening with a solo reading of her favorite sonnet.
"Measure for Measure: Shakespeare in Music" takes place next Saturday, May 24, at 6 p.m. in Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, in Lenox. Tickets are $25 (balcony) and $30 (orchestra); call (800) 843-0778 or e-mail cewmusic@aol.com. For more information, visit www.cewm.org.
