RSNO A Midsummer Night's Dream Usher Hall Edinburgh 15th March 2024 Review
RSNO A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Usher Hall tonight was oddly appropriate music for a damp, sometimes raining and cold evening in March, proving that no matter what the weather is like outside, there is still magic in words and music.
When you combine a world imagined by the words of one genius, Shakespeare, with the music of another genius, Felix Mendelssohn, something special, as expected, happens. Add into this mixture the RSNO, Carine Tinney (soprano), Rosamond Thomas (mezzo-Soprano), RSNO Youth Chorus, Thomas Søndergård (conductor), and the ability of Christine Steel (narrator) to bring words into life, all combining together to make this production and vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream a little special for everyone in the concert hall tonight.
So much has been written already over the years about both the music of Mendelssohn and his private life that there is little that this review can add. All that you can really do with a work like this is sit back, listen, and wonder how someone who was not yet 20 years old could have written even the first ideas of this music in 1827, before even his entrance exams to Berlin University were taken. Tonight’s music is from 16 years later when the now hugely experienced composer that Mendelssohn was to become was asked to write complete incidental music for Shakespeare’s famous play.
This is an amazing work that has an overture and an epilogue acting almost as bookends to 12 musical episodes of diversity, colour and emotions. This is Mendelssohn creating his world of a Midsummer Night’s Dream in music and tone and along the way creating a magical space that we can all enter into through his music and in doing so perhaps get a little closer to the man himself, almost imagining this world through his eyes, through his imagination, as he skilfully and often so subtly uses every skill available to him as a composer to bring out real magic from an orchestra.
The RSNO is constantly performing music by women composers throughout musical history and rightfully making sure that they are now given the spotlight on their talents that contemporary times so often denied them, and I am discovering so many new composers and wonderful music along the way. Sadly, many of these hugely talented women have stepped far back into the shadows of enforced musical obscurity over time and many of those who managed to attain any real recognition for their talents whilst still alive often had two things in common – family wealth to allow them to realise even part of their musical potential, and the social connections to often make the impossible a little more possible.
Tonight then, it is appropriate that the first work on tonight’s programme, “Overture in C Major”is by Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny Hensel. Even great family wealth and a prodigious musical talent with over 450 pieces to her name was not enough to save her from being forced into what contemporary society expected a woman to do, particularly when married, and publishing her own music was certainly something to be “not what one does”. This was all society’s loss as even in this short 10 minute work it is obvious that Fanny Hensel was a rare gift to music and what sister and brother could have achieved writing and performing music together can only be imagined.
The magic of childhood, or to be more precise, the slow loss of the magic of childhood and in particular the many words and often activities connected with these words was evoked beautifully in “The Lost Words” by composer James Burton, performed by the RSNO and appropriately RSNO Youth Chorus. This work is based on the book of the same name by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.
In a world where so much contemporary childhood seems to be spent playing what seems to be endless hours of video games staring at a screen, the loss of so much of a childhood spent outside in the wonderful world of nature and the endless discoveries and experiences that are on offer in a natural, non-digital world is a poignant reminder of what we are all losing. Here we are taken into that world of words, magic, wonder and exploration with Acorn, Newt, Lark, Conker, Bluebell, Willow, and Wren.
Here James Burton has created with “The Lost Words” music written especially for young voices of different ages and that is reflected in the huge variety of colours, rhythms, harmonies and themes that he is constantly playing with in these very individual, but at the same time always connected, fragments of lost words from an increasingly lost world.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
When you combine a world imagined by the words of one genius, Shakespeare, with the music of another genius, Felix Mendelssohn, something special, as expected, happens. Add into this mixture the RSNO, Carine Tinney (soprano), Rosamond Thomas (mezzo-Soprano), RSNO Youth Chorus, Thomas Søndergård (conductor), and the ability of Christine Steel (narrator) to bring words into life, all combining together to make this production and vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream a little special for everyone in the concert hall tonight.
So much has been written already over the years about both the music of Mendelssohn and his private life that there is little that this review can add. All that you can really do with a work like this is sit back, listen, and wonder how someone who was not yet 20 years old could have written even the first ideas of this music in 1827, before even his entrance exams to Berlin University were taken. Tonight’s music is from 16 years later when the now hugely experienced composer that Mendelssohn was to become was asked to write complete incidental music for Shakespeare’s famous play.
This is an amazing work that has an overture and an epilogue acting almost as bookends to 12 musical episodes of diversity, colour and emotions. This is Mendelssohn creating his world of a Midsummer Night’s Dream in music and tone and along the way creating a magical space that we can all enter into through his music and in doing so perhaps get a little closer to the man himself, almost imagining this world through his eyes, through his imagination, as he skilfully and often so subtly uses every skill available to him as a composer to bring out real magic from an orchestra.
The RSNO is constantly performing music by women composers throughout musical history and rightfully making sure that they are now given the spotlight on their talents that contemporary times so often denied them, and I am discovering so many new composers and wonderful music along the way. Sadly, many of these hugely talented women have stepped far back into the shadows of enforced musical obscurity over time and many of those who managed to attain any real recognition for their talents whilst still alive often had two things in common – family wealth to allow them to realise even part of their musical potential, and the social connections to often make the impossible a little more possible.
Tonight then, it is appropriate that the first work on tonight’s programme, “Overture in C Major”is by Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny Hensel. Even great family wealth and a prodigious musical talent with over 450 pieces to her name was not enough to save her from being forced into what contemporary society expected a woman to do, particularly when married, and publishing her own music was certainly something to be “not what one does”. This was all society’s loss as even in this short 10 minute work it is obvious that Fanny Hensel was a rare gift to music and what sister and brother could have achieved writing and performing music together can only be imagined.
The magic of childhood, or to be more precise, the slow loss of the magic of childhood and in particular the many words and often activities connected with these words was evoked beautifully in “The Lost Words” by composer James Burton, performed by the RSNO and appropriately RSNO Youth Chorus. This work is based on the book of the same name by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.
In a world where so much contemporary childhood seems to be spent playing what seems to be endless hours of video games staring at a screen, the loss of so much of a childhood spent outside in the wonderful world of nature and the endless discoveries and experiences that are on offer in a natural, non-digital world is a poignant reminder of what we are all losing. Here we are taken into that world of words, magic, wonder and exploration with Acorn, Newt, Lark, Conker, Bluebell, Willow, and Wren.
Here James Burton has created with “The Lost Words” music written especially for young voices of different ages and that is reflected in the huge variety of colours, rhythms, harmonies and themes that he is constantly playing with in these very individual, but at the same time always connected, fragments of lost words from an increasingly lost world.
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
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