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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Shakespeare: King Lear
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
Winter is the season to listen to a deep dark tragedy. Shakespeare's most profoundly disturbing tragic stagework has got to be King Lear (1605?). My first radio presentation of Shakespeare in CD format was this play, aired on Sunday, November 8, 1998 as released through Random House Audio Books, starring the octogenarian Sir John Gielgud in the title role, joined by Kenneth Branagh as Edmond and Derek Jacobi as the King of France. (A BBC Radio Three broadcast from 1994,) The Audio Books Lear I broadcast again on Sunday, February 1, 2004.
In broadcasting Lear yet again this Sunday I reach back to a different recording of the complete play from nigh on seven decades ago, as part of the Decca/Argo series of the complete recorded works of William Shakespeare. These early stereo recordings, made between 1957 and 1964, were originally issued on LP in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. It was an audio project of historic significance equal to Decca's recorded series of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas made during the same period with Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and a singing cast of some of the greatest operatic voices of the mid twentieth century. Decca's Shakespeare project engaged director George Rylands and the Marlowe Dramatic Society of Cambridge University, plus other "professional players," who included some of the finest Shakespeareans that Britain possessed at that time. Some of them remain famous names even now in the twenty-first century. In 2016 the entire Decca Shakespeare series--all thirty seven plays, the sonnets and narrative poems--was reissued on one hundred compact discs to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Bard's death. I presented Macbeth from the CD reissue on Sunday, November 7 of last year. In the Decca/Argo recording of King Lear, William Devlin is heard as the self-deluded ancient king of Britain. His daughter Cordelia is Prunella Scales. The Fool is Michael Bakewell.