The Constellation Choir & Orchestra / Gardiner

Performers:

The Constellation Orchestra
The Constellation Choir
Sam Cobb, soprano
Rebecca Hardwick, soprano
Iris Korfker, alto
Graham Neal, tenor
Jonathan Hanley, tenor
Alex Ashworth, bass
Jack Comerford, bass
Sir John Eliot Gardiner, conductor

Midsummer Night's Dreams
Nocturnal scenes full of spooks, magic and witchcraft rituals: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy set them to music in a painterly way. In this concert, Sir John Eliot Gardiner leads the ensemble he founded, The Constellation Choir & Orchestra, through the incidental music to William Shakespeare's »A Midsummer Night's Dream«, which has just made the rounds in Germany in a translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel. While elves and fairies are up to mischief in an enchanted forest near ancient Athens, druids and witches populate the scenery in the second half of the concert. Pagan sacrificial rituals are the focus of Walpurgis Night, which takes place on the Brocken in the German Harz Mountains. Carl Zelter, who had received the commission from Goethe but did not feel up to it, asked his pupil Mendelssohn to set the text to music: »I want to compose it with orchestral accompaniment as a kind of great cantata«, he replied and wrote the composition, which is rarely heard today.

programma

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Schauspielmusik zu »Ein Sommernachtstraum« op. 61 (1842)

Die erste Walpurgisnacht op. 60 (1831)