PROM 39: Mendelssohn,
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Overture and Incidental Music:
Beethoven, Symphony no. 5, Mary Nelson, Victoria Simmonds,
Methodist College Belfast Girls’ Choir, Ulster Orchestra,
Thierry Fischer, conductor, Royal Albert Hall, 13 August,
2005 (ME)
You
always get a great ovation at the Proms, especially if you
programme as enticingly as this, even if the performance lacks
fire - the Ulster Orchestra must have been well pleased with
their reception, but the problem was that they couldn’t quite
deliver what their conductor, the on-the-rise Thierry Fischer,
seemed to want of them.
Mendelssohn’s
incidental music for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is of course
more often heard as isolated fragments such as the Wedding
March, so it was good to hear it – or most of it – as a whole,
especially in the context of this year’s ‘Fairy Tales’ theme
which highlighted the obvious links to Purcell’s ‘Faerie Queene.’ The wonderful
Overture, written when the composer was only seventeen, was
played with great delicacy, the sweeping strings of the coda
(to my ears the best music Mendelssohn ever wrote) ideally
evoking the sadness of the lovers’ quarrels, but the orchestra
often seemed to have difficulty in providing what the conductor
seemed to want; it was as though his ambitions were going
one way and theirs in a quite different, perhaps less driven
direction. The two soloists sang sweetly and the girls’ choir
provided incisive, well-trained singing, but the vocal parts
seemed to lack mystery or imagination here.
Beethoven’s
5th is always a hit, even if the rendition is not
especially distinguished: there was nothing exactly wrong
with either the playing or the direction here, just the sense
that this is so familiar a piece that it really needs a bit
more than ‘just’ accuracy and good judgment in performance.
The obvious problems were that there was little sense of the
great dramatic plan of the work in evidence, and it did not
help that there was some squally intonation from the brass
and woodwind: the best playing came in the Andante, but the
Allegro’s theme seemed to take an eternity to emerge. The
audience reacted as though they had been hearing the work
for the first time, which is heart-warming in a way - the
greatness of the work transcending the limitations of the
performance.
Melanie
Eskenazi
