MUSIC FOR THE DRAMA--WITH ALL THE INCIDENTALS

Mendelssohn’s incidental music--parts of it, at any rate--to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is among the handful of works of its kind to have achieved popularity in the concert hall. The brief list of others would certainly include Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” and Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne.” All three are, coincidentally, available in new recordings, not of the familiar concert suites but of the complete scores.

Britain’s enterprising and obviously well-heeled Nimbus label goes the rest of the recording industry one better by giving us the “Complete Incidental Music and Play” (5041/2, two CDs) of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Well, the music is all there, but of the play there’s little more than an hourlong gloss, enough to give us a notion of what it’s about and where the music fits in.

Neither Shakespeare nor Mendelssohn lovers are likely to be satisfied by the results, the dramatic side being quantitatively slighted and acted by a rather too mixed bag of experienced actors and seeming neophytes, while the music is entrusted to fledgling conductor Jaime Laredo, better known as a violinist, and deservedly so.

Laredo’s conducting of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is nearly always a shade too fast (more than that in “You spotted snakes,” charmingly sung nonetheless by sopranos Eirian James and Judith Howarth), with barely a suggestion of the requisite faerie lightness.

Some two-thirds of the “Dream” music--the numbers that can stand on their own in concert--is more securely stated by the Vienna Philharmonic under Andre Previn (Philips 420 161, CD): A highly polished job whose only marked shortcoming is the tremulous soprano of Eva Lind in her solos, sung, as are all the vocal portions, in the German translation of Mendelssohn’s setting.

But the superiority of Previn’s own earlier recording (Angel 47163, CD) is inescapable. The decade-younger conductor indeed projects the sparkle and buoyancy of the score with masterful skill, the London Symphony proving no less able than the Vienna Philharmonic. Furthermore, Previn-Angel gives us the complete, hourlong score.

The familiar five-movement “Dream” concert suite is flashily and rather noisily done by Charles Dutoit and his fine Montreal Symphony (London 417 541, CD). The pacing is apt, but Dutoit achieves a weightiness of tone and lushness of texture that violates the spirit of the music. Of the accompanying Mendelssohn overtures, the relatively dense “Hebrides,” and “Ruy Blas” fare much better, while the more subtle and sweet-tempered “Fair Melusina” is quite charmless here.

Ibsen’s fantastic, poetical and very long drama “Peer Gynt” owes most of its reputation outside Scandinavia to the ambitious incidental score Grieg wrote, at the playwright’s invitation, for the premiere performance of the play in 1876.

The two concert suites Grieg concocted later hardly indicate the scope, grandeur and imaginativeness of the entire, vast score, with its many vocal numbers.

An excellent performing ensemble that has Norwegian conductor Per Dreier directing the London Symphony, a quartet of Norwegian soloists and the Olso Philharmonic Chorus gives us the last word on the subject of Grieg’s “Peer Gynt.” It includes not only the original 1876 numbers but all the movements added by the composer for three subsequent stagings: more than 100 minutes of music in all, few of them uninspired (Unicorn-Kanchana 2003/4, two CDs).

The concert suites from Bizet’s incidental music to “L’Arlesienne,” Alphonse Daudet’s long-forgotten “tragedy of reckless passion,” are likewise unindicative of the true worth of the whole 50-minute score, written not for Romantic symphony orchestra but for a 26-member pit band and small chorus.

Bizet was able to work wonders with this ensemble, evoking, perhaps more potently than Daudet’s reputedly feeble melodrama deserved, the harsh passions of the characters and the sere Camargue landscape in which they are acted out.

The complete “L’Arlesienne” incidental music makes its first appearance on recordings, 115 years after its world premiere, in a powerful, richly detailed performance by the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra and Orfeon Donostiarra chorus under Michel Plasson’s direction (Angel 47460, LP and CD). Don’t miss it.