Steve Hackett
A Midsummer Night's Dream

"On Fairy-Stories"

Athens was buzzing. A sense of growing excitement was spreading through the city's streets, as the celebrations for the marriage of Duke Theseus with the Amazon queen Hippolyta approached. Even a group of modest craftsmen, led by the carpenter Peter Quince, was striving to adequately stage a theatrical performance to present before the nobility on the anticipated day of the wedding, despite the exuberant weaver Nick Bottom's and his clumsy companions' interpretative qualities not being precisely the most refined.

In this frame of happy expectations and feverish preparations, the heart of young Hermia was, however, crushed, as she was promised by her father to the unwanted Demetrius. She found herself forced to plan an escape through the woods to avoid such an oppressive imposition, revealing only to her friend Helena the illicit intention of leaving the capital in the company of her true love Lysander. Fate, however, decreed that the designated place as a meeting point for the two lovers, hidden by the impenetrable greenness of the trees, was a battleground for the whims of the elf king Oberon, who, offended by his companion Titania for not having given him a boy from her entourage to use as a page, decided to take revenge by unleashing the wild Puck, who, aside from dealing with the fairy queen, more or less accidentally targeted the fleeing lovers from Athens, the group of workers who had gathered nearby to rehearse their upcoming performance lines, and the furious Demetrius, hunting his betrothed, after being informed of the situation by Helena, who was hopelessly, albeit fruitlessly, in love with him.

In the midst of this inextricable Shakespearean chaos, the poetic and classical side of Steve Hackett's multifaceted personality ventures in 1997, equipped with classical guitar and accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, he confidently heads towards the lavish palace of Theseus with every intention of officiating the incipient ceremony with chords, indifferent to the temporal leap of about four hundred years that divides the recording of the album from the original drafting of the immortal comedy it is inspired by.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a creature with a hybrid and unusual identity because, while employing a vast array of instruments, it reserves much of the melodic solutions to the guitar alone, thus positioning itself in a neutral territory, bordering on one side with the purely acoustic pair "Bay of Kings" (1983) / "Momentum" (1988) and on the other with the recent "Metamorpheus" (2005), where the orchestra, particularly in the spotlight, contributes to generating a more homogeneous sound mix. However, this consideration should not be misleading, as the predominant independence of the string instrument, in this case, translates into compositions with a pastoral and intimate taste that blend well with the fairy tale-like contents of the subject work.

Thus are born surreal yet highly detailed sets directed by the guitar, which, like a wandering minstrel, first visits the splendors of the court ("The Palace of Theseus"), remaining ecstatic before the triumph of strings depicting Hermia's poignant and misunderstood feelings ("A Form in Wax"), and then, murmuring to itself as if to reassure, delves into magical and mysterious territories ("Within This Wood"), echoing the stories and evocative memories of inscrutable beings ("By Paved Fountain", "Set Your Heart at Rest"), distinguished by a lively yet refined regal aura ("Oberon") and a boundless charm ("Titania"), painted with such skill and intensity by the re-emerged orchestra, as to appear almost tangible ("In the Beached Margent of the Sea", "Between the Cold Moon & the Earth").

The entrance of the mischievous jester of the elf king, dressed in flamboyant baroque garments ("Puck", a character reincarnated for about twenty years in the dark miurian universe), focuses Steve's attention on the nursery rhymes, meant to lull the sweet slumber of Titania, sung by her helpful fairies, to which the guitarist dedicates the memories of a hallucinated parallel world ("Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth & Mustardseed" presents, at 1:26, a hint of the first few seconds of "The Colony of Slippermen" from '74), while his brother John, appearing as if by an arcane spell, lends his flute to the impulsivity of youthful feelings ("Lysander & Demetrius"), sometimes cruelly painful in their burning and indomitable passion ("Helena").

With the return on stage of the duke and his deep meditations, entrusted to the oboe and strings ("The Lunatic, the Lover & the Poet", "Starlight"), the celebrations for the much-anticipated wedding open, which, in a triumph of winds exalted by Roger King's organ ("Celebration"), lowers the curtain on a curious and dreamlike story, melancholically honored by the orchestra ("Mountains Turned into Clouds") and by the gentle arpeggios of that guitar ("All Is Mended") so devoted, until the last moment, in trying to make us as involved as possible in every delightful nuance of an enchanting and unrepeatable dream... A Midsummer Night's Dream.