http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXW60zFpRwc&feature=player_detailpage Mendelssohn's incidental music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Op.

61, was completed 16 years after he wrote the Overture, Op. 21, though the consistency of style and musical unity between them belie the disparate dates of composition, with the former composed by an incredibly musically gifted youth of 17, the latter - by the music director of Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm IV's Academy of the Arts and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" had always been a favorite of Felix and his sister, Fanny, which accounts for the composition of the overture. The commission for the remaining music came from the King, for a Potsdam production of the play. The incidental music consists of 14 sections, including the overture itself, set both as vocal pieces and instrumental movements. The music combines the traditional forms and structures of classical music with the feeling and expression of the Romantic era. I've chosen three selections from the opus that quickly caught my mind: the Scherzo, the song with chorus, "You spotted snakes", and the Notturno.

I. The Scherzo appropriately introduces the fairy-world of Act Two with delightful rapid, running passages in the woodwinds, similar to the string passage in the opening of the overture. The rest of the orchestra joins the woodwinds in a classical sonata-form movement. Several small motives are repeated, up and down, then down and up the scale, to form the development section.

II. The song with chorus, accompanied by a string bass line and murmuring of the winds to suggest the buzzing of the critters, comes at a logical place in the play, as the fairies chase away "beetles, hedgehogs and snakes" to prevent them from disturbing Titania's rest. The song is classically cast in two couplets, each sung by one of the two soloists-fairies (originally two sopranos, here - a soprano and a mezzo-soprano) with the repeat turning into a delightful echo duettino, ending with a lighthearted refrain of delightful proportions.

Judith Blegen and Florence Quivar, both congenial to the parts of the fairies, are accompanied to great effect by James Levine, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Chorus in an unusual English version of the score. Hope you'll enjoy :).