Don Quixote

This heavily abridged recording focuses on our romantic hero's most salient adventures, realistically omitting the vast dialectic mass of the novel. The listener begins to get a feel for Cervantes' novelistic brilliance, but misses the full effect of his mordant satire of contemporary social and literary pretensions. De Souza's reading from the late seventeenth-century translation is natural and confident; his pacing is perfect. He deftly executes Cervantes' characterizations, infusing the characters with the requisite humor or grave solemnity. Exquisite reprises of music from the Spanish Renaissance lighten the density of the prose and heighten the historical ambiance, further enriching this first-rate performance. B.M.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Christopher Casenove employs an impressive range of British accents in his Performance--and presents everyone from earl to washerwoman. Such voices may not be what listeners expect from DON QUIXOTE, but they make it easy to tell who's speaking, even when a scene contains more than one character of a certain "type." Together, the excerpts which comprise this abridgeent convey the tone and spirit of the source without awkward breaks or transitions. The music that begins and ends each tape--solo classical guitar--summons images of the Spanish countryside, and might have done so more effectively had it been integrated into the reading. T.J.W. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine