| John Copley directed with elegant restraint and intelligence, while conductor Kenneth Montgomery exacted stylish playing from the local orchestra. Several of the da capo arias were decapitated, so to speak, and the ballet of "Good and Bad Dreams" was eliminated, but only purists were grumbling. Designer Conklin's aesthetic vision, which repeats itself through much of his work these days, offered glimpses of a crumbling Greco-Roman world, with classical fragments flanked by picture-frame openings and mobile panels of faux marble. Michael Stennett's costumes were a colorful pastiche of period styles ranging over a few centuries, although the story takes place in medieval Edinburgh./ Review |
