„A Midsummer Night's Dream“ – Lenzburg Castle

Two masterworks looking back across the centuries

Empyrean Orchestra and the Zurich Boys' Choir under the direction of Kevin Griffiths at Lenzburg Castle – with Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia and Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This programme brings together works that connect past and present in a special way. Thomas Tallis and William Shakespeare belonged to the same great cultural era. When Tallis died, Shakespeare was a young man.

Some two hundred years later, Felix Mendelssohn turned to Shakespeare's world and, with A Midsummer Night's Dream, created music full of lightness, wit and enchantment, from the overture to the festive Wedding March.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, in turn, looked back across the centuries to Thomas Tallis. In his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis he transformed a sixteenth-century melody into a work of great breadth, radiance and spiritual depth.

Fascinating connections thus emerge across the centuries. Mendelssohn conjures the theatre, fantasy and moonlight of old England, Vaughan Williams its cathedrals, memory and sacred soundworld.