Page 44 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

21 June 2020

A Life On-Line: Mendelssohn's Fairies, Miss Havisham's Wedding, Guildhall
School's virtual technology and powerful Mahler
Labels: A Life On-Line

Virtual rendering of Takis designs for Guildhall School of Music's opera double bill

We started the week with Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as filtered through Felix
Mendelssohn's imagination. As part of his Mendelssohn cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra
(LSO), John Eliot Gardiner performed Mendelssohn's Symphony No .1 and incidental music to A
Midsummer Night's Dream at the Barbican in February 2016 and that was the LSO's archive
broadcast as part of its Always Playing season.
Gardiner has a long history of working with modern instrument orchestra and, using a
reduced size LSO, he conjured some wonderful sounds in Mendelssohn's early symphony
(written when he was just 15). When Mendelssohn conducted the symphony in London
when he was 20, he wrote to his parents that he thought the scherzo was boring and so
had created a new one from the scherzo to the Octet! Gardiner, ever interested in the
fine detail of the music, gave us both scherzos. Delicious.

Then came the music from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Mendelssohn writes little for the
mechanicals, and not that much for the lovers, so Gardiner had trimmed the music slightly, and
created a version in which three actors from Guildhall School of Music and Drama played seven roles,
Ceri-Lyn Cissone was Hermia/Fairy/Titania, Frankie Wakefield was Oberon/Theseus, and Alexander
Knox Lysander/Puck. The result was highly satisfying, with some lovely singing from the women of
the Monteverdi Choir, which provided the fairy soloists as well, Jessica Cale, Sarah Denbee,
Charlotte Ashley, Rebecca Hardwick.

Such trimmings down work well because Mendelssohn's overture, written when he was 17, was not
designed for a performance of the play and is more of a tone poem, encapsulating the entire work in a
single piece of music. All the more remarkably, when Mendelssohn returned to the play 16 years later
he was able to re-capture the moment.