A Midsummer Night's Dream, Snape Maltings

★★★ A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, SNAPE MALTINGS A starry cast cannot quite bring this blurred 'Dream' into focus

A starry cast cannot quite bring this blurred 'Dream' into focus

It’s all there in the first few bars of Britten’s music – that unsettling tension between beauty and familiarity, and eerie, undefinable otherness. Those cello glissandi might end in glowing major chords, but the tentacle-like slides throw them into doubt. We’re no longer in a binary world of major or minor, but a harmonic landscape of infinite possibility.