HONOLULU — What were you doing when you were 17 years old? That’s the question conductor Dane Lam put to the audience to introduce the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Neal S. Blaisdell Concert Hall on March 8. Mendelssohn wrote the famous overture as a teenager and returned to complete the rest of the incidental music 16 years later. Although the piece is typically performed with a narrator, the HSO shared the stage with actors from the Manoa Valley Theatre, seamlessly presenting Mendelssohn’s music with Shakespeare’s comedy to make a very entertaining production.
Lam, who is of Australian and Chinese descent, knows a thing or two about accomplishing amazing tasks at a young age. At age 18, just after graduating from high school, he was selected for the Conductor Development program, now known as the Australian Conducting Academy, and impressed Italian conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti, then head of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. Gelmetti invited Lam to study in Tuscany for three summers and to conduct the overture to Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro in three subscription concerts with the Sydney Symphony.
Since completing his master’s degree at Juilliard, Lam has led orchestras and opera companies on several continents. He currently maintains a trio of assignments as artistic director of the State Opera South Australia (Adelaide), principal conductor of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra in China, and — since 2023 — music director of the Hawai’i Symphony, formerly known as the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. That organization went bankrupt in 2010 and was resurrected the following year under its new name.
The collaboration between the HSO and the Manoa Valley Theatre represented the first concert in the HSO’s Sounds of Shakespeare Festival, a three-concert series celebrating music inspired by the Bard’s plays. The two remaining concerts center on Prokofiev’s and Tchaikovsky’s interpretations of Romeo and Juliet, with the Tchaikovsky offering a collaboration with Ballet Hawaii.
With part of the stage at Blaisdell Concert Hall covering the orchestra pit, the cast of eight actors — all wearing microphones — had plenty of room to maneuver in front of the orchestra. Entering and exiting from the sides, the actors, directed by Rob Duval, made the most of eight chairs, reconfiguring them as needed to tell the humorous story of lovers in a forested fairyland.
Urged on by Lam’s energetic gestures and clear baton, the orchestra elicited the magical qualities of Mendelssohn’s music. The inspired ensemble evoked a feathery fairy world, the passions of young lovers (Ari Agodong, Emily Steward, Adam Kalma, and Alex Munro), the nobility of Oberon (Kevin Keaveney), the pride of Tatiana (Jasmine Haley Anderson), and the hee-hawing of Bottom (Andrew Baker). Lithe woodwinds popped in and out to create the litheness of Puck (Tiger Tam), who scampered about with elan. The horns highlighted the Nocturne movement with calm sonorities while Tatiana and the youthful lovers slept. The Wedding March received a robust yet stately interpretation that suited the triple nuptials perfectly, and the orchestra unleashed unbridled joy with a spirited Dance of the Clowns.
An ensemble of nine women sang Tatiana to sleep with the delightful “You spotted snakes” and closed out the comic tale with a merry “Through this house give glimmering light.” Yet some words were lost, perhaps because the singers were placed behind and to one side of the orchestra. Additional text in the program would have helped to solve that issue.
From beginning to end, Lam and his forces were alert to all of the action and made sure that there were no glitches and the pacing never flagged. The resulting standing ovation was well deserved.
By collaborating with the Manoa Valley Theatre, the production put a spotlight on the arts community in Hawaii and broadened the HSO audience to include theatergoers. The concert hall, which has 2,158 seats, is far larger than MVT’s home base, which accommodates only 150. So the event was mutually beneficial, a win-win that echoed Jaques’ observation in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage.”
