18.08.2024

CHRITIANE KARG sings Berlioz' Les nuits d'été

Mendelssohn composed his famous Midsummer Night's Dream Overture as a teenager, but was only able to incorporate it into the incidental music for Shakespeare's fantastic comedy 16 years later. The incidental music was commissioned by King Frederick William IV of Prussia and will be performed in this special performance at the Theatre of the New Palace in Potsdam, the exact location of the premiere in October 1843. Singing alongside the Kammerakademie Potsdam and its chief conductor Antonella Manacorda are soloists Jeanine De Bique and Christiane Karg, who will also appear in Berlioz's exquisite song cycle Les nuits d'été, a work created just two years before Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream.

The title Les Nuits d'été can be read as an allusion to the "Midsummer Night's Dream". However, this is misleading. Hector Berlióz does not conjure up balmy summer nights in his song cycle Les nuits d'été. He depicts dark nights full of melancholy and melancholy, nights of lost love, nights of death, eerie nights at the grave of a deceased lover.

Christiane Karg has already performed this special song cycle with the Kammerakademie Potsdam under the direction of Antonello Manacorda on a small tour in November 2023 and was able to show even then that these songs are characterised by tremendous emotionality - ideal for Christiane Karg, who can showcase all her expressive power here as a master of small dramas.

Programme:
Hector Berlioz: "Les nuits d'été"
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Midsummer Night's Dream, incidental music op.61

Christiane Karg, soprano
Jeanine De Bique, soprano
Kammerakademie Potsdam, NDR Vokalensemble
Antonello Manacorda, conductor

To be experienced live on the streaming platform stage+
on 18 August 2024 at 6.00 pm