Download THE AUSTRALIAN Bard adds relevance to meagre `festival`

The Australian online, Monday 19 October 2015
THE AUSTRALIAN
Bard adds relevance to meagre
‘festival’
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GRAHAM STRAHLE
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THE AUSTRALI AN
OCTOBER 19, 2015 12: 00AM
STCSA actors Dale March and Anna Steen with ASO viola player Michael Robertson. Picture: Calum
RobertsonSource: News Corp Australia
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Mendelssohn Fest is the least ambitious
of the composer festivals it has been running over the past dozen years.
Offering just a pair of concerts, a film screening and minor adjunct
events that run until October 24, it is really too small to be worth its
name.
However, one bold and quite wonderful idea justified holding it. This was to
bring the orchestra and the State Theatre Company of South Australia
together — apparently their first collaboration — in a semi-staged
performance of Mendelssohn’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The program as a whole could have been more imaginatively conceived.
Even though Mendelssohn’s great championing of Bach is well known, the
latter’s Brandenburg Concerto No 1 seemed a universe away as an opener,
providing no discernible connections with the main work. A straitjacketed,
dynamically flat performance did not help either, bar some gloriously warm
playing from the ASO’s woodwinds.
More interest centred on Mendelssohn’s rarely performed Three Motets, Op
39, which he wrote for Catholic nuns after visiting Rome. Joyful and sweetly
mellifluous, they lack any liturgical profundity, but their purity of spirit was
undeniable. The Women of the Elder Conservatorium Chorale were wellrehearsed and firm in tone. Dynamics still felt unvaried though, and the
orchestra rather unengaged.
But the miraculous combination of Mendelssohn and Shakespeare can have
no equal, and inspiration flowed aplenty in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Four actors from STCSA bobbed up within and around the orchestra like
ferrets on the loose, reciting sprinklings of dialogue excerpted from the play
— just enough to give a taste of its characters and carnivalesque world.
What was particularly enjoyable was the complete incidental music in all its
loveliness. Nicholas McGegan’s conducting was vital and the orchestral
playing pin-sharp. Energy surged in the Overture’s gossamer textures and
chatter of woodwind, and the Dance of the Clowns skipped with gleeful
speed and delicacy. The WeddingMarch cackled with festive spirit and
the Nocturne floated with heart-in-throat beauty. Sopranos drawn from the
choir gave creditable if slightly faltering accounts of interspersing songs such
as You Spotted Snakes, while the choir itself was impeccable.
Mischievous comedy from Bottom (John Maurice) and Puck (Dale March),
in which they daubed make-up on the conductor and stuck party hats and
masks on two orchestral players, added terrific fun.
Mendelssohn Fest. Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Adelaide Town Hall,
October 17.