Royal Albert Hall,London
Katherine Broderick shone in a total version of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while soloist Alisa Weilerstein stood up to the demands of Pintscher’s explosive Reflections of NarcissusOpportunities to hear Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its entirety are scarce, or though a handful of extracts – the Overture,Scherzo, Nocturne and the ubiquitous Wedding March – are popular concert pieces. But there’s much more to it than these, and including a sequence of melodramas (consisting of music written to accompany speech),two songs with refrain, and an odd tiny comic-grotesque funeral march in the play-within-a-play sequence.
This year’s Shakespeare celebrations inspired this Proms performance of the whole score in a version devised by Gerard McBurney, and incorporating (with the help of half a dozen skilful actors) some of the original context for the music.
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Source: theguardian.com