Garsington Opera, The Royal Shakespeare Company

Artists from Garsington Opera and the Royal Shakespeare Company present Shakespeare's verse and Mendelssohn's music.

Mendelssohn was only 17 years old when he wrote an overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, having read Shakespeare's play in a German translation.

It is a richly illustrative and imaginative work, packed with musical effects to evoke the rustle of leaves in the breeze, the darting movements of Queen Mab and her fairy crew and the braying of an ass.

Sixteen years later, in 1842, Mendelssohn returned to the subject, composing incidental music for the play to a commission from King Frederick IV of Prussia.

Garsington Opera's artistic director, Douglas Boyd, collaborates with Gregory Doran, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, on a venture involving artists from both companies.

Mendelssohn's shimmeringly beautiful and evocative music brings fresh illumination to Shakespeare's brilliantly intertwined, triple-layered dream-world, where lovers, fairies and rude mechanicals confuse and pursue one another in a wood near Athens.

In a rare collaboration Garsington Opera and the Royal Shakespeare Company presents Shakespeare's play alongside the full incidental music by Mendelssohn.