Listening with your eyes closed to this lovely musical performance of 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' by The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) can playfully and musically transport you into a world of fairies, mischief, and adventure. LSO performs Mendelssohn’s piece flawlessly and with great finesse and skill, invoking the listener’s vivid imagination. 

It is not an easy task to take a room and turn it into an enchanted forest. With the woodwinds–flutes, clarinets, bassoons, oboe—as well as percussion, trombone and trumpets, horns, and other impressive instruments, a secret magic began to ensnare me at several points in the overture. At one point, clever Mendelssohn even inserts a little two note descending motif that sounds like the ‘’hee haw’’ of a donkey. This is a clear reference to Nick Bottom, the Athenian weaver. Puck, loyal to Oberon—King of the Fairies—and grand trickster ‘’makes an ass’’ of Nick Bottom literally by magically turning Nick’s head into a donkey head, and that can be deduced from the LSO’s sudden twists of the hand. 

A mysterious and beautiful magic transpires from the notes and breaks down all of your boundaries, transcending language barriers and eradicating all of your defenses, reaching to discover the very essence of your soul. The overarching effort of the playful clarinets and flutes gives the impression of an environment of scented flowers and soft flight of butterflies. Meanwhile the deep strings illustrate the games of the ever-changing love triangles oscillating between Helena, Demetrius, Lysander and Hermia.  

LSO succeeds in unravelling the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into an orchestra of emotions and sensorial experience, creating the impression that there is more to this world than meets the eye, or in this case the ear and manages to enhance our sensitive perception and to educate our opinion of Mendelssohn’s musical strategy.  

All we need to experience it is to close our eyes, listen, and let the freedom of imagination guide us towards a secret meadow where the King and Queen of the fairies await to tend to our every whim.