Peer Gynt --> February 23, 1995, Toronto Star, Review: Plummer's Peer Gynt polished --> February 21, 1995, Globe and Mail, Christopher Plummer's Mission --> February 18, 1995, The Record (Canada), Review: Plummer riveting in Peer Gynt --> February 13, 1995, The Record (Canada), Plummer feels new version of Peer Gynt clarifies narrative <-- --> May 13, 1993, Hartford Courant, Review: `Peer Gynt' successfully joins orchestral music, spoken word --> May 9, 1993, Hartford Courant, HSO, Plummer to perform new version of Grieg's `Peer Gynt -->May 9, 1993, Hartford Courant, Plummer joined in project to help do justice to Ibsen -->May 9, 1993, The Hartford Courant, Concert Ad -->May 6, 1993, PR Newswire, Christopher Plummer Stars in World Premiere of Hartford Symphony Orchestra's Peer Gynt

Photo from The Hartford Courant, May 9, 1993 Program notes by Michael Lankester and Christopher Plummer from the world premiere May 12, 1993 A February 1995 concert of Peer Gynt was broadcast live on CBC radio, narrated by Christopher Plummer with the Toronto Symphony.

The "new performing version" of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, a collaboration of actor Christopher Plummer and conductor Michael Lankester , was as ingenious in structure as good carpentry, and as polished as fine cabinet work in last night's performance by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (with Lankester conducting) in Roy Thomson Hall.

Though the 40-year multi-continent spread of the Ibsen original shrank to meagre dimensions, the selected sequences were vivid enough to compensate in part for the loss of much of the variety and humor in Ibsen's vast dream-like canvas. As Peer Gynt, the dissolute wastrel, Christopher Plummer easily held the audience by his good humored grasp of Peer's mercurial temperament and his uncanny sense of pace, especially in moments of poetic insight.

Without Plummer's virtuosity, the new version could have seemed lifeless, but without Lankester's devotion to Grieg's music, the result would have been bleak indeed, for his arrangement displayed the variety and dramatic strength of a clearly undervalued composer, whose surprisingly sturdy music created an evocative melodrama rich in atmosphere.

There was pleasure in recognizing old favorites such as "Solveig's Song," with soprano Monica Whicher, and "Anitra's Dance," with mezzo Norine Burgess, to have "Ase's Death" so well placed as a first-act curtain, and to hear the Mountain King's music in context. But it was the vocal surround provided by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir that gave the work its true dimension as a playable new version of two neglected classics.

The work will be repeated tonight and Saturday.

In Person / In his concert-stage version of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, the actor's aim is to restore the character to his rightful place alongside, not drowned in, Grieg's music. Plummer: 'If you're going to have an actor, a voice, and you're going to mix it with music, there's no point in doing it unless each gets an equal hearing.' (Photo by John Reeves, The Globe and Mail)

February 21, 1995

There aren't nearly as many stars visible as there used to be. Stars who know how to enjoy a long lunch, who order wine without looking at the list and still have Dorian Gray skin, who tell amusing anecdotes about colleagues and self-deprecating ones about themselves, then go to the theatre and get the job done, dammit.

Christopher Plummer is a star of the old school. The school that teaches Shakespeare should be spoken in "trumpet" voice, the barrel tones of Olivier, not the camera ready wheedle of Kenneth Branagh. Plummer is from the school that says you respect the author's words and the story he's created. Which is what he's trying to do with a new concert-stage version of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, accompanied by Grieg's score, at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, starting tomorrow evening.

Plummer has said he "loathed" the other concert versions of Ibsen's fantastical 1867 verse narrative, because the story always got upstaged by Grieg's lush and familiar music. The Montreal-born actor's "tiny mission," he says, is to restore Ibsen's Peer - a boastful, swaggering, peripatetic scoundrel drawn from Norwegian folklore - to his rightful place alongside, not drowned in, Grieg's music.

"If you're going to have an actor, a voice, and you're going to mix it with music, there's no point in doing it unless each gets an equal hearing," says Plummer over lunch in a Toronto restaurant, where he orders a side of chili-pepper flakes to put a little heat into a blustery winter day.

At 65, he's vibrant and fit, looking too young to insist he's "much too old" to play a full theatrical version of Peer Gynt. (And he knows it: After revealing his age, he mock-pouts, "You didn't tell me I don't look my age!")

There was a time when he planned to star in a theatrical version of Peer Gynt, at England's Chichester Festival in the late sixties, but he fell ill. Plummer has had plenty of time to think about the play, and the interpretation he formed then and pondered over the next couple of decades will finally see the spotlight, in a truncated form.

"I saw [the play] as a dream, and I think Ibsen must have seen it as a sort of dream. Here's someone who was in search not only of himself but a love that he couldn't find. He travels the world looking for it, and comes back home in the end to find it's been waiting for him there all along. The fact is, he never left that room."

Even if it's only in his head, Peer does leave his room - many times - making the drama a difficult one to stage. Ibsen's last drama in verse (which he didn't originally intend to be staged as a play), Peer Gynt contains a huge cast, a variety of exotic locales and requires the central character to age decades.

Plummer will handle these problems by staging a dramatic reading in which he'll play Peer and two other characters - the Button Moulder and the troll called The Great Boyg. In and around the reading, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will perform Grieg's music under the direction of guest conductor Michael Lankester. (The Plummer-Lankester Peer Gynt premiered in Hartford, Conn., in 1993).

Lankester and Plummer, who both sprang from England's National Theatre, have done this kind of music and monologue collaboration before: Their Henry V (words by Shakespeare, music by Walton) played to packed houses at Roy Thompson Hall in 1993. "And that's no mean feat in that awful hall," Plummer grumbles. He modifies his opinion of RTH slightly - "It was a nice charitable gift" - and then launches into a story, one of those anecdotes theatre people are supposed to keep on hand like spare change. This one was about the time Macbeth (Plummer) and his Lady (Glenda Jackson) visited Toronto's O'Keefe Centre in 1988.

"What a terrible play that is!" Plummer chortles about that cursed Scottish drama, "What a masochistic thing - and I've done it twice. Can you believe anyone being dumb enough to do it not once, but twice!"

Rumours of ill-will between Jackson and her co-star were bunk but made for good press, Plummer says, "Glenda and I got on fine. I caught her smiling one night at the curtain call and kicked her. I said, don't smile, we're supposed to hate each other!"

When the play got to Washington, Plummer and Jackson were feted at the Canadian embassy. By accident or design, Jackson - notoriously left wing, and now a Labour MP in Britain - got seated next to a CIA honcho. "She demolished him," Plummer says gleefully. "He dug his own grave. As he was leaving I heard him say, 'And I used to like the English.' "

Perhaps most famous for his film role as the stony Baron von Trapp in The Sound of Music, Plummer has continued to act for the camera - in The Silent Partner, Wolf, Counterstrike and the forthcoming Dolores Claiborne, for example - but the stage is his heart's home. Right now, the true object of his affection is the fledgling Atlantic Theatre Festival in Wolfville, N.S., for which he's raising money.

"The whole Nova Scotia trip totally seduced me," says Plummer, who now lives in Connecticut but filmed Dolores Claiborne, based on the Stephen King bestseller, in Canada's ocean playground. "I'm Canadian, and I can't believe I'd never been there. ... I felt like it was the beginnings of the country again; the spirit that should be but isn't any more. God, it was great," he catches himself in mid-gush and pretends to play a sweeping violin. "But it's so symbolic, isn't it?"

To raise money for the festival, which begins its first year with a three-week run in June, Plummer did a performance of his one-man show, A Word or Two, Before You Go, in Wolfville. It's the same show he has used to raise money at Stratford, and he now draws a comparison between the birth, more than four decades ago, of the Ontario stage festival and its newborn Maritime cousin. "This is just as exciting as when Tom Patterson picked up that telephone and called Tyrone Guthrie."

There is also a rumour that Plummer had been asked to take on a role that sprang from the silver screen, not out of Norwegian mythology. Is it true that Garth Dabrinsky asked him to play Max, Norma Desmond's loyal manservant, in Andrew Lloyd Webber's version of Sunset Boulevard? Plummer gazes sideways from narrowed blue eyes, wearing a feline smile. "Uh-huh," he admits. For a million dollars? "Well, close to that."

"He's always been terribly sweet to me, Garth," Plummer continues. "But once I heard George Hearn sing [the role of Max on Broadway], I knew I was dead, because that's something you can't speak. You need a big voice, a real ringer, because he only has one number. Webber doesn't write dialogue, so you can't do well in dialogue and fail slightly in singing and be forgiven." It's not something he'll ever have to worry about with Peer Gynt: the music taken care of, he just has to look after the words.
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Peer Gynt plays Roy Thompson Hall Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday at 8 p.m. each day. Joining Christopher Plummer and the TSO will be the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, mezzo-soprano Norine Burgess and soprano Monica Whicher.

A novel, abridged version of Henrik Ibsen's 1867 dramatic poem Peer Gynt, including Edvard Grieg's picturesque musical score, was presented on Friday to a doting 80 per cent full house at Centre in the Square.

Doting? Well, if extended applause and a lengthy standing ovation of all but a few are any indication, the audience was rather taken with the tightened rendition of this complicated yarn.

Formulated by actor Christopher Plummer and conductor Michael Lankester (who appeared along with the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony, soprano Monica Whicher, mezzo-soprano Norine Burgess and the Wilfrid Laurier University Choir) this Norwegian allegory was reset with care and informed taste. Ibsen's tale was written before he approached Grieg to provide incidental music for some scenes. As it turned out, Grieg's music, based at times on traditional Norwegian folk styles, soon led a life of its own in the form of two popular orchestral suites. This music, so vivid and colorfully set, has in the last decades enjoyed a further popularity in the areas of pop and commercial tunes.

So the music, anyway, could be a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. What was riveting about Friday's performance was Plummer, and his interpretation of Peer Gynt.

Described as unwieldy, in its original form the fantasy contains over 40 scene changes and a complete version of the drama would take two complete evenings.

With skill and a visceral sense of theatre, Plummer and Lankester pared the story without sacrificing the tensions, laughs and emotions.

Plummer is a consummate actor, and his accomplishments range from film to classical theatre to Broadway. It's difficult to imagine another actor tackling the character of Gynt and making him come alive with the amount of human frailty and passion that sparked off the stage on Friday.

He is a star and has the necessary mastery and charisma and immediacy to make you believe he's telling this story to you alone.

Not only that, Plummer tugs at more emotions than you were prepared to experience, and this is exhilarating.

Lankester's a true theatre man as well, and led the orchestra with astounding tact and grace. Perhaps the players were inspired by Plummer and the virtuoso delivery of every line, but the KWS sounded heavenly when necessary and holy terrifying enough to jolt the daylights at others.

It's no surprise that Lankester studied with Sir Adrian Boult, as he has acquired that precise understatement that Boult brought to operatic scores.

That Plummer and Lankester have a history of collaboration is also evident, for without their sterling backgrounds and shared sense of style, a performance such as Friday's Peer Gynt would be impossible.

The WLU Choir was polished and shimmering, adding depth to the instrumental writing. Whicher as Solveig was of such purity she made us all feel wanting and Burgess' sultry Anitra was appropriately shady and mocking.

This mesmerizing performance is repeated again tonight at 8 pm at Centre in the Square.

When is a play not a play? According to Christopher Plummer, if it was written as a play it remains as a play, no matter in what form it is presented.

Peer Gynt, by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, becomes a conumdrum, then, for it was written in 1867 as a dramatic poem, and not intended to be staged.

Several years later, Ibsen was persuaded to stage it, and Edvard Greig was asked to compose incidental music for the production.

The plot thickens. Not only did this create more awareness of the piece as a play and not as a poem, but Greig's music for Peer Gynt has superseded the popularity of the manuscript to the general public. Indeed, most people who are aware of In The Hall Of The Mountain King, and Morning, by Greig, think that Peer Gynt was simply a Norse legend which formed the basis for the musical suite.

On Friday and Saturday, Feb.17 and 18, Kitchener-Waterloo audiences will have an opportunity to experience Peer Gynt in a setting closer to Ibsen's original intention, but using Greig's music to enhance the text.

Christopher Plummer will be at Centre in the Square together with the K-W Symphony to narrate a new adaptation of the work. He and conductor Michael Lankester are responsible for this version, and Plummer feels it has clarified the narrative line enormously.

"Peer Gynt is one of the most difficult texts to begin with," said Plummer in an interview last week. "If you did the whole play in the theatre it would probably take two days - I mean, it's just endless. And there are so many people in it that no one can keep track of them or know who they are."

Plummer feels this new version gets to the heart of the text without losing the allegorical intention of the original.

"Ibsen had so many sub-plots that the audience was completely side-tracked," he said. "This was fine in the poem, but disaster on stage. It works much better in the concert hall. It's clearer -- you have one person playing Peer Gynt and the narrator, and we have two female soloists and a chorus to take on the roles of Solveig, the Trolls, mountain goddesses, and so on, and this makes the characters fun."

In this version, Greig's music is completely integrated, often forming the background while the narrative is voiced-over.

Lankester feels there is much justification for a new version. "Both Greig and Ibsen were practical men of the theatre and changed and adapted their work for every new set of circumstances."

Plummer and Lankester have simply carried on the tradition, making the work more accessible to modern audiences.

Illustrious career

With an illustrious career behind him, Plummer has no intention of slowing down. Hailed by the Washington Post as "the finest classical actor of the Americas," it is no wonder that he balks when asked about his role of Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music.

For Plummer, it was both a blessing and a curse.

"All huge films are wonderful in a way, for they make you popular enough to attract an audience for some of the things you really want to do. The curse is that many people only identify you with that role, and it may not represent your very best work.

"Although I have nothing to be ashamed of in The Sound of Music it wasn't the most exciting part I've ever played. I wish the same number of people who saw that film had seen so many other stage and screen roles where I think I have done better work."

One of his most recent films was Star Trek VI -- The Undiscovered Country, in which he played Klingon General Chang, and played him to the hilt as a Shakespearean quoting war monger. It also reunited him with fellow Canadian actor William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk.

"Bill and I go back to our days as kids in Montreal and Toronto, when we acted in anything that would get us heard or seen. We did every radio soap opera on the air originating out of Toronto. Those were wonderful days, with people like Frank Petty around."

Plummer chuckles about the line in Star Trek, "you really haven't heard Shakespeare until you've heard it in the original Klingon."

Along with Plummer and conductor Lankester in Peer Gynt will be soprano Monica Whicher and mezzo Norine Burgess, plus the 120-voice Wilfrid Laurier University Choir, directed by Noel Edison.

For more information or tickets, call the Centre in the Square box office at 578-1570.

GRAPHIC: Christopher Plummer narrates Peer Gynt at Centre in the Square Friday and Saturday.

Considering how simple and obvious an idea it is, it's puzzling that there have been so relatively few really successful marriages of orchestral music with the spoken word.

Of the perhaps several dozen such pieces that can be called repertoire items, one of the most fretted over is "Peer Gynt," the union of Henrik Ibsen's darkly discursive verse/drama and Edvard Grieg's misty, pastoral music.

Wednesday night the Hartford Symphony unveiled a new performing version of "Peer," concocted jointly by HSO music director Michael Lankester and veteran actor Christopher Plummer. While it may not have solved all the work's lingering issues, this enterprising new edition proved to be a thing of great theatricality and genuine emotional pull.

Just to quickly help define it: the Lankester/Plummer approach places the speaker -- it was Plummer himself -- at center stage, next to the conductor, with the orchestra and chorus behind him. The speaker is nearly always in character as Peer himself, the mythical Norwegian country lad whose strenuous search for meaning and solace yields, in the end, primarily regret. The music threads in and out behind and under Peer, often in a cleverly punctuating, overlapping way.

The result is surprisingly seamless and coherent, even though great chunks of the multi-hour original have been shed for this trim, under-90-minute version. A great deal of credit must go to Plummer for making it all work Wednesday. Impressively, the man did his homework -- though he's in action almost continuously, he barely consulted his printed text. He also struck a fine balance between offering dry, stock-still narration, which would not have worked here, and allowing himself to do a hammy star-turn, which would have overwhelmed the music.

Lankester kept the show moving forward, and though there were sections that suffered from needlessly ponderous tempos, there was in general a forward-leaning momentum. And as is his particular wont, he really leaned on the large, bombastic sections.

There were solid contributions from soprano Jane Thorngren, and mezzo-soprano Joyce Campana. Thorngren's pure, elegiac solo -- as Peer's long-suffering beloved, Solveig -- brought the evening to a hushed, electric conclusion.

The Hartford Chorale performed crisply; it wasn't clear why they were asked to sing in Norwegian when the spoken text was in English.

Ironically, the very integration of the words and music served to illustrate that Ibsen and Grieg were something of a mismatch: the playwright's voice is filled with irony and bite and broodingness, while the composer speaks in essentially gentle and wistful terms, becoming, I'm afraid, rather cornily melodramatic when attempting to depict danger or alarm.

Still, as theater, this new "Peer" works. It should, and I think it will, have a life after Hartford.

May 9, 1993

`Peer' anew
Lankester, Plummer to unveil new performing version of `Peer Gynt'

It's not entirely frivolous to note that an excerpt from Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt" is being used at the moment as the soundtrack to a Bud Light commercial.

The commercial, which is set to "In the Hall of the Mountain King," shows a hapless young Lothario attempting to pick up a woman at a bar. As she soothes her hair non-committally, her boyfriend, a scowling, shaved-head giant, comes into view and chases the luckless masher into the street and beyond.

For one thing, the commercial actually has some remote resonance with the character of Peer, the mythical Norse ne'er-do-well who traversed his country and the globe in a futile search for fulfillment.

For another, the commercial reminds us that Grieg's "Peer Gynt" lives on as one of those relatively rare pieces of classical music that has worked its way into the general consciousness, even if casual listeners may not always recognize its source. Its best-known number, "Morning Mood," has come to convey the dew-moistened essence of any new day, in everything from panoramic travelogues to (as I recall from distant groggy Saturday mornings) a Yosemite Sam cartoon.

Grieg's incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" was commissioned by the playwright himself. It consists of a series of short, evocative sections that illustrate Peer's various episodes, and which in performance alternate with the text.

This week, the Hartford Symphony will present a new version of the piece, devised by HSO music director Michael Lankester and actor Christopher Plummer.

Plummer, a Weston resident, will act as narrator at the performances, which are Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8 at the Bushnell Memorial in Hartford. The performances will also feature the Hartford Chorale.

The pair of concerts are the last Bushnell events in the symphony's 1992-93 season, which was abbreviated because of the symphony's 14-month contract dispute that ended late last fall.

Why a new version?

Despite the fact that Grieg's music has achieved popular acceptance on its own, and that Ibsen's verse/drama still stands as a pillar of the stage, the marriage of the two -- at least as a performable creature in the theater -- has always been a bit rocky.

During his lifetime, Grieg endlessly tinkered with the music, without ever arriving at a definitive version. He extracted two orchestral suites, both of which have become popular in the concert hall, even though the numbers are placed out of sequence with the story, and give only a faint sense of the text.

Over the years, many more attempts have been made to find the right recipe, some omitting any text altogether, others doing away with the often beautiful choral writing. Today, more than 100 years after its 1876 first performance, there is nothing even approaching a standard version.

As with so many of history's collaborations between writers and composers, the working atmosphere between Grieg (1843-1907) and Ibsen (1828-1906) was less than serene.

From the outset Grieg fretted about the task of trying to provide music for the unwieldy story, which traces the loutish peasant boy's adventures with women, trolls, foreigners and other threatening beings -- all of which bring him little in the way of wisdom or comfort.

In fact, not long after he began work on the project, which was to occupy him for nearly two years, Grieg complained in a letter to a friend:

"Peer Gynt goes slowly. ... It is a horribly intractable subject except for a few places. I have something for the hall of the troll king that I literally cannot bear to listen to, it reeks so of cow-turds and super-Norwegianism."

Ibsen, meanwhile, grew to resent the fact that Grieg's music quickly became popular in its own right, somewhat overshadowing the play. To a later inquiry about the possibility of another collaboration, Ibsen snapped, "So you think `Peer' is good music, do you?"

Lankester says his own collaboration with Plummer, a friend since the '70s, when the two met in England at the National Theater, has been more cordial.

"Chris is a great student of Ibsen's play, and the two of us first booted around this idea of a new version six or seven years ago," says Lankester. "We've spent God knows how many hours on it since then. It's one of those huge tasks that just keeps going on and on. In fact we've been on the phone together twice already today, doing a little last-minute fine-tuning."

Lankester declines to reveal the particulars of the new version, citing his wish for all listeners to be surprised. But he says the words are all Ibsen, and that all of the best music is included.

"What I did, really, was take a look at all the music from all the various versions, including some that has never been published, and put it into a big melting pot and then extract from that all the music that it seemed to me you just couldn't possibly leave out. With the words, the job was to work out a condensation of the poem/play that would carry the story along and that would be suitable for one actor to portray."

The new version, which is based on an English translation by Peter Watts, runs a little more than an hour.

"What I hope is that the piece, heard in a correct format and setting, can really make an impact," Lankester says. "As it is, people only know some of the numbers from the suites, which unfortunately are played by every amateur orchestra in the world."

This is not Lankester's first attempt to revise a large-scale semi-theatrical work for chorus, narrator and orchestra. In 1989 he conceived and conducted a strikingly effective presentation of Prokofiev's cantata "Ivan the Terrible," which has just been released on a compact disc on the Sony Classical label, with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. As it happens, Plummer is narrator on the recording.

If this new "Peer" will be of interest to music lovers in general, it will have special meaning to those of Norwegian heritage.

Despite the fact that Ibsen's "Peer" is, in critic John Simon's words, partly a "satire on Norwegian pettiness, cowardice and lack of vision," the myth is a powerful and still resonant story in that country.

"I would say that today in Norway there is still a great awareness and affection for the story, and there is a constant effort to renew it all the time," says Berit Brevig, a Norwegian-born American who is the music consultant to the Norwegian consulate in New York.

Brevig is also closely connected to "Peer" by virtue of being a founding member of the Edvard Grieg Society, a group devoted to tending the flame of this gentle, sometimes slighted composer, who is unquestionably Norway's most celebrated.

"We have the feeling that Grieg's music is sometimes underrated in this country," says Brevig, whose husband, conductor Per Brevig, is president of the society. "We know that he has a few pieces that are well known, but we feel there is so much more than just these to appreciate."

Grieg's Piano Concerto, his "Holberg Suite" and a few others are standard items in the classical repertory, but other compositions, including many songs and piano pieces, are seldom performed.

Among other things, a recent symposium on Grieg at Columbia University and a six-evening marathon survey of the complete piano works, presented earlier this spring, have boosted the composer's profile.

"We feel the concerts in Hartford will be important, too," says Brevig. "And we're looking forward to being there."

The Hartford Symphony Orchestra, with the Hartford Chorale and Christopher Plummer, speaker, will present "Peer Gynt" Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8 at the Bushnell Memorial, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. HSO music director Michael Lankester will conduct. Tickets are $12 to $37. Box office: 246-6807.

Caption:
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) endlessly tinkered with his
incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's "Peer Gynt."
Courant file photo
In Norway, the myth of Peer Gynt is still resonant and
powerful.
Actor Christopher Plummer of Weston will be the
narrator at a Hartford Symphony performance of Grieg's
`Peer Gynt' at the Bushnell this week.
Michael McAndrews/The Hartford Courant

Actor Christopher Plummer, who will be the speaker in the Hartford Symphony's production of "Peer Gynt" this week, wants it known that he is not just a hired star being wheeled in to sell some tickets.

He is also co-creator -- along with HSO music director Michael Lankester -- of this "significantly new" version of the work, which combines large portions of Henrik Ibsen's play with large portions of Edvard Grieg's incidental music. The piece will be presented Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Hartford's Bushnell Memorial.

"I decided to do this project with Michael because I love the work, and I was determined to do some justice to Ibsen," says Plummer. The 65-year-old actor, looking tan and trim in the way actors inexplicably do, was in town recently for a dense round of "Peer"-related interviews. It wasn't that arduous a road trip for Plummer -- he lives in Weston.

"You know, there have been so many other attempts to do concert versions of this piece, and the ones I've seen I loathe," he says. "I really think we've come up with something here that works as theater and as music."

Beyond saying that the text and the music will be fully integrated, and that he will embody the character of Peer -- the dreamy lad who wanders the Norwegian countryside and, later, the world -- Plummer declines to reveal many details about the new version.

"I think the whole element of surprise should belong to the critic as much as to the public," he says with a grin.

Although Plummer is clearly the word person in this words-and-music project, he says he is a devoted fan of classical music and admits to an early aspiration to be a concert pianist.

"I was pretty serious about it for a while, up through my high school days," says Plummer, who grew up in Montreal. "But one of my classmates happened to be Oscar Peterson, who played both classical music and jazz at the time. And of course even then he dazzled everyone. Sensibly I decided to give it up around that time."

Plummer has been enjoying something of a new sub-career in the orchestral-narration field of late.

He has been the speaker in several recent recordings, including Prokofiev's "Ivan the Terrible" (in a version by Lankester written with Plummer in mind) and William Walton's score for the film of Shakespeare's "Henry V."

He says he is also working with Lankester on yet another such project, a new edition of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," incorporating the incidental music of Mendelssohn.

"There is a special skill and a special kind of satisfaction to it," Plummer says. "You're a kind of soloist. I don't go prancing around trying to act my socks off. That would be totally embarrassing. No, you stand almost totally still and let the voice do the work. You get a certain rhythm and cadence going, and that's what sends the words aloft, above the music. I love it."

Ad from The Hartford Courant, Sunday, May 9, 1993

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