A Midsummer Night's Dream - Shakespeare's Classic Comedy Play | Perfect for Theater Performances, Literature Study & Book Clubs

A Midsummer Night's Dream by Oberon was, for many years, one of those records that -- like Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day -- seemed to cause collectors to lose their equilibrium and part with huge sums of cash for possession of a copy. I'll leave others to recount the history of Oberon and the resulting album, but suffice to say, when this two-CD edition was announced, I was in.I'm still in. Boy am I in.A Midsummer Night's Dream is, indeed, a lost classic of uncommon beauty -- a mix of understated traditional folk (from both sides of the Atlantic), mildly electric folk-rock, classical, jazz, blues, pop (from both sides of the Atlantic), and progressive rock that somehow holds together amid myriad changes across just under 40 minutes of music. Pentangle and the Incredible String Band seem to be the most obvious influences, although I'm sure other, sharper ears than mine will pick up other flashes of inspiration behind the work. Each of the eight tracks from the original album is memorable in its own way, and any album that includes a rendition of a Debussy piece, a Gershwin song ("Summertime"), and a Tolkien-derived, boldly apocalyptic conceptual piece entitled "Minas Tirith" all on the same record deserves points for boldness. (Speaking of "Minas Tirith," it's got just about the only drum solo I've ever heard on what is essentially a folk-rock album, and it does work).The second disc is a live recording of the group from 1971, which is an exceptionally generous bonus feature (given the extraordinary rarity of the original album, the label could have gotten away with issuing just the latter). The sound quality is excellent, and the performance of the material off of A Midsummer Night's Dream is actually superior in the live setting, and makes the entire release one of the great revelatory issues in its genre, and maybe the biggest bargain in the entire Grape Fruit/Cherry Red catalog.