Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Nights Dream – Judd

Seventeen years old, and already he had solved a problem that would occupy him, on and off, for the rest of his short life: how to make an orchestra sound like moonlight and gossamer and the mischief of the woods all at once. The Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream came first, in 1826, a wedding gift to Shakespeare from a boy genius still living under his father’s roof in Berlin. The rest, the Scherzo, the Nocturne, the Wedding March everyone claims to be sick of and never actually is, waited sixteen years, until the King of Prussia asked for a full theatrical score and Mendelssohn, older now, sorrier, wiser, obliged without losing a trace of that original evening freshness. The seams barely show.

Naxos here takes the sensible middle path, sensible, at least, compared with the alternatives. You could just play the notes and let the fragments lie there exposed, half-finished melodic gestures with nowhere to go, the way Previn’s old EMI account does, bless it. You could hire a single narrator to paper over the gaps: Claudio Abbado got Kenneth Branagh for the job, urbane and unhurried, and it worked rather beautifully; Erich Leinsdorf, less fortunate, got Inga Swenson delivering Shakespeare as though reading a hotel fire-safety notice. Or you could go the full Tate/Laredo route and stage practically the whole play across two discs, incidental music be damned, drama first. Here, instead: a compact troupe of seven actors, doubling and tripling roles with evident relish, threading just enough dialogue through the score to justify its stops and starts without turning the enterprise into repertory theater on record.

David Timson directs the spoken material and also plays Theseus and Bottom, and he clearly understands where the emphasis should fall. The Oberon-Titania quarrel gets room to breathe. The Mechanicals, Timson’s Bottom bellowing his way through with the confidence of a man who has never once suspected he might be an ass, dominate proportionally, as they should, since Mendelssohn himself gave them the best tunes, that lumbering bassoon-and-ophicleide music that turns Bottom’s transformation into pure orchestral slapstick. The four lovers get shorter shrift. Understandable, given time constraints, but Hermia and Helena’s quarrel is reduced almost to a stage direction, existing mainly to set up the “Nocturne,” which is a shame, because that scene, properly acted, makes the horn duet that follows land twice as hard.

And what a “Nocturne” it is here. James Judd, leading the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, finally lets the tempo relax. Everywhere else in this interpretation he keeps things moving, sometimes almost too briskly, running “You Spotted Snakes” straight into its neighboring number with barely a comma’s pause. I missed the breath there. But the horns in the Nocturne, muted, dusky, achingly sustained. This is Mendelssohn’s answer to a Bellini opera aria transplanted into the orchestra, and Judd knows it, slowing the pulse and letting the strings underneath glow rather than shimmer.

The Overture itself sets the tone for the whole reading: light-fingered, transparent, the divided violins fluttering in that famous opening chord-progression like something genuinely nocturnal and slightly dangerous. The ophicleide part, taken on tuba as is now standard practice (good luck finding an actual ophicleide player these days, or an actual ophicleide), growls under the development section with just the right hint of menace before the coda dissolves everything back into calm. It trusts Mendelssohn’s own instincts about pacing rather than imposing an interpretive agenda on top of them. No exaggerated hush, no inflated grandeur. Just clarity.

The choral numbers are the disc’s loveliest surprise. Varsity Voices and Nota Bene, the women’s contingent, sing with a warmth of tone and cleanness of diction you don’t always get from ensembles assembled for this kind of project. No wobble, no mush in the softer passages. Jenny Wollerman and Pepe Becker take the two solo lines, and their voices don’t blend so much as complement: Becker brighter, more silvery up top, Wollerman rounder and warmer underneath, so that “You Spotted Snakes,” even truncated at the seams by Judd’s tempo, comes off as a genuine duet of characters rather than two sopranos taking turns.

Is it a first choice? Depends what you want. Completists chasing the fullest theatrical experience should still go to Tate or Laredo. Those who want elegance without the play at all have Previn or the old Klemperer, austere and monumental in a way Mendelssohn probably never intended. But for a version that respects both the play and the score, that doesn’t strand Mendelssohn’s fragments in mid-air nor drown them in unabridged Shakespeare, this Naxos disc earns its place. Judd’s touch is light, the cast is unfussy and alert, and the ophicleide, or whatever we’re calling it this century, growls exactly on cue.