Product Description

Glyndebourne's production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night's Dream is pure magic. Brilliantly adapted from Shakespeare's play, the opera follows the adventures of four lovers and a group of naïve rustics who, in a wood on a moonstruck midsummer night, fall foul of Oberon and Tytania, the quarrelling king and queen of the fairies. In Hall's remarkable staging the very wood comes alive as logs and trees move and rustle, creating ambiguous silhouettes in the dark mysterious woodland, lit only by designer John Bury's wonderful rising sun and moon. Stars Felicity Lott, Ileana Cotrubas, and James Bowman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51562 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-07-27
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Classical, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 156 minutes

Customer Reviews

Lovely music and production
I think Britten handled Shakespeare very well here, and I only wish he had set other Shakespeare plays into opera. The mechanicals were very funny and I thought the lovers quite convincing, though not teenagers. Britten seemed to trust children in his operas as his career went on; here the fairies are all children (except Oberon and Titania) and Puck is especially tricky as a little boy. I thought Cotrubas was a very effective Titania and wished that a recent production of the play I saw (not the opera) had such an imperious fairy queen. I was not crazy about the Oberon, but it was Britten's choice to have a high male voice for the part, for good dramatic reason, to stress his difference from humans; but I found the voice to lack power. Others have said they did not like the woods, but I found them quite magical and for me, they worked very well, giving a rustling magical forest feeling. The mechanicals are funny and their opera within an opera is silly and touching.

A Dream come true
I've been waiting for this to arrive on DVD having fallen in love with it on LaserDisk. And it has been worth the wait. Britten is up to the task of turning Shakespeare into opera. He devises a different sound for each of the three forces - the fairies, the mortals and the rustics. The casting is ideal with a young Cotrubas as Titania outstanding. Bernard Haitink keeps everything moving. And Peter Hall gives it a magical production with an eerie forest where the trees seem to have a life of their own. All comes to a head in the Pyramus and Thysbe drama played as a hilarious spoof of bel canto. Let yourself be translated to fairyland.

Wonderful Music
The London Philharmonic, the truly spectacular boy's voices, and some great opera singing show off the extraordinary brilliance of Britten's composition and make this recording a necessary part of a serious opera collection. But don't expect the same from the production. The sets and costumes leave much to be desired. None of the lovers look convincing, and the "moving branches" that constitute the forest make one think of Macbeth's Birnam Woods a bit too often! A "low budget" production can often work very well for live opera performances, but with zoom lenses on the cameras and a relatively large screen home theater, the flaws distract. I enjoyed some of the scenes more by turning away from the screen and just listening.