Edinburgh Festival

RSNO/Sondergard

Edinburgh Academy Junior School

Keith Bruce

four stars

PERHAPS a visitor to the Festival City heard the Wedding March ring out on Wednesday evening, looked over to the marquee pitched on an Inverleith playing field, and thought: “Poor souls, they have a right dreich night for it.”

Well, the good news is that no bride was harmed by the torrential rain that fell continuously throughout the performance of the complete Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although it might have been more fitting if Felix Mendelssohn had composed a score for The Tempest.

The first of three concerts by the RSNO in this temporary Edinburgh International Festival venue was under the baton of music director Thomas Sondergard, with guest singers soprano Rowan Pierce and mezzo Kathryn Rudge as well as a small cohort from the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. The ladies of the choir were offstage, and not as audible as they might have been, but they were bringing choral singing back to a live audience for the first time since the pandemic struck, and were cheered to the awnings when they appeared, under colourful umbrellas, at the curtain call.

That Wedding March aside, the best known part of the Midsummer Night’s Dream suite is its Overture, which the composer had written 16 years before, at just 17 years of age. It is intriguing evidence the mature Mendelssohn was well aware of his own precocious talent that he took this early work as a template for the music for the whole production of Shakespeare’s play, its themes recurring through to the Dance of the Clowns and Puck’s declaration of the end of our revels.

Alongside the choir, the vocal star of the evening was Dame Harriet Walter, delivering the lines of Shakespeare’s poetry that give a condensed version of the plot like a hyper-abridged radio drama, with appearances of fairies, lovers and the mechanicals depicted in her changes of tone. The soloists too, were well chosen for the different timbre of their voices, although neither had a huge amount to do, particularly Rudge.

The musical meat of the evening was all in the hands of orchestra, which was on stellar form, with principal horn Chris Gough’s solo work on the lovers’ nocturne a particular highlight. Sondergard’s approach was away from the sparer sound of historically informed practice and towards plenty of rubato and big Romantic welly – which was appropriate, given the weather.