By John Zeugner
Telegram & Gazette Reviewer
April 4, 2005

WORCESTER - Setting the Bard to music is no cakewalk.

Most composers just key off Shakespeare's plots or sentiments. Mendelssohn's mood piece on "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" have entered the permanent repertoire, as has Verdi's magic opera "Falstaff" - a blend of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor" and a couple of the Henry Plays.

Very few composers have tried to set the Bard's actual words to notes.

That's a nervy undertaking, since the music of his language can overwhelm the composer's intention. Or worse, the ambiguity of Shakespeare's conceptions can conflict in some listener's mind with whatever interpretation the musical version presents.

Worcester's own composer Joseph Summer has taken up the challenge, not only setting several Shakespeare sonnets to music but, more ambitiously, setting scenes and soliloquies from "Hamlet" to piano, harp and voice illustration.

Summer, who has written several operas, including a cycle based on Boccaccio's "The Decameron," has put together a remarkable and complex mix of his compositions dealing with Shakespeare, as well as some by others in a production that appeared yesterday at Clark University's Razzo Hall in the new Traina Art Center.

The Gala Guild Shakespeare Concert brought together a terrific ensemble of very gifted young instrumentalists and vocalists.

The program got under way with pianist Miroslav Sekera playing te last movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, nicknamed "The Tempest," allegedly after Shakespeare's play.

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