A Midsummer Night's Dream is a 55-minute studio album containing the overture and almost all of the incidental music that Felix Mendelssohn wrote to accompany William Shakespeare's play of the same name. It is performed by Kathleen Battle, Frederica von Stade, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Seiji Ozawa, with interlinking passages of verse spoken by Judi Dench. It was released in 1994.
Background
The album includes all of Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream except his score's No. 6, a melodrama. The vocal numbers are sung in Shakespeare's English rather than in the German translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Dorothea Tieck that Mendelssohn set, necessitating a few small deviations from Mendelssohn's original score.
The album is the second of two recordings of the work in which Frederica von Stade took part. In the first, released by RCA Victor Red Seal on LP in 1977 and on CD in 1985, she performed a shorter, reordered German-language version of the score with Judith Blegen and the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. For details, see A Midsummer Night's Dream (Eugene Ormandy recording).
Recording
The album was digitally recorded in October 1992 in Symphony Hall, Boston.
Cover art
The cover of the album features a painting by .
Critical reception
Alan Sanders reviewed the album in Gramophone in October 1994, comparing it with what he considered to be the best recording of the work to have appeared thitherto, a Teldec disc conducted by Kurt Masur. Kathleen Battle, Frederica von Stade and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus had all sung "with great distinction", he wrote. And the playing of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was "of the highest quality" and "beautifully brought off" from the first bar of the album to the last. But the brightest star in the CD's constellation of talents was Seiji Ozawa. Conducting with precision, pointedness and more fantasy than Masur had supplied, he struck "an ideal balance between conveying the underlying strength of Mendelssohn's writing and bringing out the music's wide-eyed freshness, its delicacy and its gentle, slightly teasing sense of humour". His reading of the Overture, for example, was powerful and cogent, but he was alert to every detail of the score and it seemed as though he was conducting with a smile. The only charge that could be laid against him was that his pace in the Scherzo was slightly slower than some listeners might prefer. Taken as a whole, the album had one minor weakness and one decisive advantage. Its flaw was that it fell just short of presenting Mendelssohn's score in its entirety: a single number, an allegro, was omitted. The lacuna amounted to merely a few minutes of "brief and sometimes repetitive orchestral comments", but the missing bars were engaging and their absence was regrettable. But this irritating solecism was not grave enough to outweigh the asset that the album enjoyed in its narrator, Judi Dench. Where Masur's disc had passages of interpolated dialogue in German, Ozawa's had excerpts from Shakespeare's text spoken by Dench in English. Her first appearance (amidst the closing notes of the Scherzo) was somewhat jolting, but the "great character and wit" of her subsequent contributions were what "[lifted] the issue above all other competition". The album was an "[almost] ideal representation of Mendelssohn's music for Shakespeare's play", and it came with the bonus of audio quality that was first class.