The Constellation Choir & Orchestra / Gardiner

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.