A Midsummer Night's Dream, overture, Op. 21
A Midsummer Night's Dream, incidental music, Op. 61

Continuing his award-winning cycle, Sir John Eliot Gardiner leads the LSO, his Monteverdi Choir and three talented young actors from the Guildhall in a landmark performance of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was performed as part of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. To mark the celebrations, Gardiner produced a special version of the work featuring some cuts to the original movements that, in his words, ‘remove all of the music relating to the Mechanicals and thus focus on the world of the fairies and the human lovers.’ Mendelssohn, who adored Shakespeare’s writings, composed his concert overture based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1827 at the young age of 17, after having read a German translation of the play in 1826. The overture was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and quickly became a popular favourite throughout Europe. Years later in 1843 he was asked by the King of Prussia to provide a score for an entire production. It’s made of 14 short works based on themes and moods from the original overture, with a broadly romantic sound although classical in style and structure. Music scholar George Grove described it as “the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music” and reviewer Peter Read says “an astonishing feat of imagination and perception, one of the perfect acts of musical interpretation arising out of early-nineteenth-century sensibilities that, nearly two centuries later, is still channelling our understanding of Shakespeare’s disarming examination of the workings of our subconscious”. The release’s Pure Audio Blu-ray disc will include bonus footage of the concert performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 1, alongside high resolution master audio.

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Recorded live at the Barbican Hall, 16th February 2016