NO / EN
Ensemble Allegria, The Oslo Chamber Academy, The Norwegian Solist Choir and conductor Grete Pedersen, open the Oslo Chamber Music Festival 2023 in Universitetets Aula
Program
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) - A Midsummer Night's Dream
A wonderful adventure, fairies and elves in the forest, love, magic and humour. The country's best female voices, string players and wind players, one of Europe's foremost choral conductors and, not least, a storyteller with wit, humor and power from the high north! With all this and more, we open this year's Oslo Chamber Music Festival with a bang in Universitetets Aula.
Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream is his best-known scene music, and perhaps the most famous is the overture (he wrote it when he was 17) and the wedding march from it. He captures in the work the romantic fairy-tale atmosphere in a fabulous way, the one that Shakespeare provides in his text. But Shakespeare's English play text has this time been translated into Northern Norwegian in an earlier translation by Ragnar Olsen.
This is the plot in a couple of sentences: Four Athenians, two women and two men, escape into the forest. There they are bewitched by the elf Puck, who makes the two men fall in love with the same woman. The four chase each other through the forest while Puck helps his master Oberon make a small gesture towards the fairy queen Titania. It all ends with Puck breaking the spell, and the two couples become friends again and get married.
Welcome to the festival opening!
Text from https://oslokammermusikkfestival.no/det-var-en-gang-en-midtsommernattsdrom/