R E V I E W S:

"Robert Ward's The Crucible was warmly received on its first production in New York in 1961, and it has since been very widely performed, not only in the United States...Ward's music is swift moving and gratefully lyrical. His language owes a lot to the American vernacular of his teachers Howard Hanson and Aaron Copland...and something also to an operatic vernacular rooted in Puccini...There is a certain cragginess, too, drawn partly from very careful word-setting of Miller's archaizing text and very apt for evoking the starched rigor of a closed and in-turned community, that seems to be Ward's own...This one was made not long after the first performance, by the company that created it; under Emerson Buckley's direction there is a crackling sense of pace and of stage-seasoned ensemble." (Gramophone)