Musical responses to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are among the themes of this year’s Proms. Mendelssohn’s incidental music and Britten’s opera can be heard later in the season, but before that came a staging, first seen in France last year, by choreographer-director Mourad Merzouki of The Fairy Queen, Purcell’s glorious sequence of songs, dances and masques for an anonymous 1692 adaptation of the play. Paul Agnew conducted Les Arts Florissants and singers from its young artists academy, Le Jardin des Voix. Merzouki’s own Compagnie Käfig supplied the dancers.
The end result was in some ways idiosyncratic yet extraordinarily captivating. Jettisoning the dialogue is nowadays standard practice in performance, though Merzouki also dispensed with Shakespearean narrative, using movement to illustrate strands of imagery in the sung text. So the dancers preened like birds during Come All Ye Songsters of the Sky, and a soloist conveyed the vagaries of desire with angular, yearning gestures in If Love’s a Sweet Passion. Merzouki’s street-dance, hip-hop style suits Purcell’s exuberant worldliness uncommonly well, but his real genius here lies in his ability to integrate movement between singers and dancers so they function as an indivisible theatrical unit. The singers danced, albeit without the spectacular acrobatics of Compagnie Käfig, and the dancers joined in the final chorus They Shall Be As Happy As They’re Fair. It was never less than mesmerising to watch.
Agnew took a few liberties with the score. There were some cuts and re-orderings, with the excision of Let the Fifes and the Clarions the principal casualty. Some of the detail got lost in the vast space of the Albert Hall, but Agnew conducted with wonderful grace, and it was played with great rhythmic dexterity and an admirable sensuousness of tone and texture. Nine singers, all of them excellent, shared the arias and choruses between them. Tenor Ilja Aksionov sounded elegant yet suggestive in One Charming Night, while bass-baritone Benjamin Schilperoort sung Hush, No More with a dark fervour and great beauty. It was baritone Hugo Herman-Wilson, a real stage animal, who dominated the ensemble, though, with acting and singing of great subtlety and wit.