Prom 68, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Garsington Opera review - eerie beauty sometimes faintly glittering

Some operas shine in the vasts of the Albert Hall, others seem to creep back into their beautiful shells. Glyndebourne’s Carmen blazed, though Bizet never intended his opera for a big theatre, while Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, despite an equally fine cast from what’s now an equally fine company, Garsington Opera, left us with some black holes in the iridescent spider-web.

That was no fault of Douglas Boyd’s pacing in a work which can take time to get going, with country miles of exposition, compressing crucial facts from Shakespeare's Acts One and Two, nor of his bewitching Philharmonia players. Indeed, while certain sounds are often noted – Puck’s acrobatic trumpet and drum, Bottom’s trombone, Oberon’s eerie celesta – it’s rare that one gets to realise how amazingly Britten meshes unexpected groups of players. What we hear from the opera-house pit often feels large in intention, but with reduced strings and brass – the opera played first in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall – it’s all on a tight leash held by a master inventor of fresh and unexpected textures. Underneath it lie long-term harmonic arguments as rigorous as those in The Turn of the Screw; the more you get to know what Britten's up to, the greater the respect for genius at work. Boyd might have waited a bit longer for the audience to settle before those eerie glissandos of the living wood glimmered through the darkness, but once we got the ricochet of percussion to introduce the child fairies (the Garsington Youth Opera Company, superb throughout, pictured above backstage), the magic truly took over.

Iestyn Davies and Lucy Crowe always hold a stage, and worked this venue for luminous tone-colours, while the body language of Netia Jones’ direction for Oberon and Tytania – reimagined here by Rebecca Meltzer, though I missed the beauty of Jones’s projections – heightened the sense of dissension over the "little changeling boy”. This Fairy King and Queen (Davies and Crowe pictured below with Jerone Marsh-Reid's Puck and Daniel Vening's transformed Bottom) are never at rest in the battle of the sexes, which may have cued the all-too-briefly featured acridity between a drunk Theseus (Nicholas Crawley) and angry Hippolyta (Christine Rice, luxury casting), one of several production points that didn’t quite land. Given costumes to carry the burden, it seemed as if Jones’s concept was dominated by colour palettes, black versus white, without the overall cohesion to be found in Robert Carsen's much-travelled production. The lovers came hotfoot from the Athenian Academy, the boys not out of short trousers at first. The lower voices, baritone James Newby and mezzo Stephanie Wake-Edwards, carried better, but there was tonal beauty when you could catch if from tenor Casper Singh and soprano Camilla Harris.

All four (pictured below waiting for the court entertainment) have bright futures ahead of them. The climactic Act Two spat was full of action, winning a round of applause in the hall as all four exited in confusion, co-ordination with the players just about holding. And the Act Three quartet was rightly incandescent. The ensemble of mechanicals might have been diminished a little by the indisposition of the original Bottom, Richard Burkhard; his place was taken by Daniel Vening, who played it straight (no slip inside my programme, where Burkhard was listed and biographied). Star of the show-within-a-play, as so often, was Flute/Thisbe, here progressing from tremulous "let not me play a woman" to indomitable queen in a bright-red ballgown; three cheers for the charismatic James Way, especially in his imperious 11 o'clock number.

There were good visual gags for slow-of-study Snug (Frazer Scott), taking bites of banana and carrot between utterances, and a stiffly-plastered Wall (Adam Sullivan's Snout, pictured below with fellow mechanicals). John Savournin and Geoffrey Dolton got big laughs, too, for the cheesy music-hall routine they exercised for the Bergomask Dance. Then, midnight magic, and finally an encouragement to willing applause from Jerone Marsh-Reid's lime-green-suited Puck, suitably engaging and modestly acrobatic. The audience left smiling. From my place in the hall, it was a three-star experience, and I'd certainly want to see the production in its proper home, praying for a revival, but Garsington Opera deserves four for highest musical values on its Proms debut.

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