Oberon

Recorded by students at the start of their summer holidays, Oberon’s self-financed, 99-copies-only 1971 album “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” is one of the rarest, most expensive artefacts to emerge from the primordial soup of the early Seventies British underground scene. More importantly, it also boasts a reputation as one of the most vital, with one commentator suggesting that “at least one of the few copies pressed should be preserved in the British Museum”.
Having featured tracks from the album on our heavily-praised 3-CD British underground folk collections Dust On The Nettles and Sumer Is Icumen In, the Grapefruit label now celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the making of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” by issuing the album in its entirety…

For the specific atmosphere of Oberon Michael Hofstetter found it crucial that the performance was played on the period instruments Weber composed for. In Giessen, he worked with four natural horns, natural trumpets, finely tuned trombones and not least flutes made of wood instead of metal. This produced an inexhaustible wealth of acoustic colors, enabling us to sensually experience what might really be meant by the concept of German Romanticism on the musical level. Michael Hofstetter conducts at many well known opera houses, orchestras and festivals, include the Bavarian, the Hamburg, the Hanover and the Stuttgart State Operas, Theater an der Wien, the Royal Opera Copenhagen, the Welsh National Opera, the English National Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Canadian Opera Company Toronto and many others. Future engagements will see him again at the International Handel Festival in Halle, with Orchestre National d‘Île de France in Paris and at the International Gluck Festival Nuremberg.