Xxxholic The Movie: A Midsummer Night's Dream (2005)

Dream Music - The Movie Music of Tangerine Dream is a 1993 compilation album by Tangerine Dream featuring material from three of soundtrack albums for the films The Park Is Mine, Deadly Care and Dead Solid Perfect.

Continuing his award-winning cycle of works by Felix Mendelssohn, Sir John Eliot Gardiner leads the LSO, his Monteverdi Choir and three talented young actors from the Guildhall in a landmark performance of 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream', which was performed as part of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. To mark the celebrations, Gardiner produced a special version of the work featuring some cuts to the original movements that, in his words, "remove all of the music relating to the Mechanicals and thus focus on the world of the fairies and the human lovers". Mendelssohn, who adored Shakespeare’s writings, composed his concert overture based on 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' in 1827 aged 17, after having read a German translation of the play. The overture was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and quickly became a popular favourite throughout Europe. Years later in 1843 he was asked by the King of Prussia to provide a score for an entire production: 14 short works based on themes and moods from the original overture, with a broadly romantic sound although classical in style and structure.

This 1994 recording of most of Mendelssohn's incidental music from Ein Sommernachtstraum coupled with his Fingal's Cave Overture was one of Philippe Herreweghe's first with the Orchestre des Champs Elysées, one of the first French romantic period instrument orchestras, and it was almost but not quite a success. While the Orchestre's sound is fresh and appealing with characterful winds, warm brass, and sweet strings, it is also an odd and sometimes ungainly sound with perhaps overly pungent clarinets and bassoons, possibly overly raw horns and surely occasionally scrappy strings.