He does a mean Captain Von Trapp and a great Mike Wallace, but at Wednesday and last night's National Arts Center Orchestra's performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Christopher Plummer played his best role.

Pairing Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream with the famous classical Shakespearean actor is, on paper, a marriage made in heaven. Both Plummer and Mendelssohn share a love for Shakespeare. Mendelssohn wrote this incidental music and acted in the play while still in his teens, while Plummer launched his career at on of Canada's leading classical actors at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Stratford Festival.

So, it's a perfect match, right?

Well, like most marriages, what begins brilliantly often does not end too soon.

Plummer, dressed in blue velour and black tie, is terrific as narrator, reciting snippets from seminal moments in the play to give Mendelssohn's music some much-needed narrative content. His face is expressive and his voice changes character, accent and timbre with ease. With 50 years experience behind him, he knows the play the way most people know their own name, he played, quoted might be a better description, many roles with the buffoonery that suits the play's light-hearted, whimsical personality.

In his program notes, Plummer apologizes for performing excerpts but indeed, his choice of script and comic bits are a model of economy. It was this 'pared-down' performance that thrilled, while his musical collaborator Michael Lankester's performance of the the full Mendelssohn score sounded like it was missing something. The orchestra was articulate as ever, but their pacing was tired and the dynamic range was flat.

The Ottawa Central Children's Chorus and the Regional Youth Choir with sopranos Sharleen Joynt and Sarah Shropshire were excellent. The soloists have lovely, clear voices that blend well with this large and sweet-sounding chorus.

This all-Mendelssohn evening opened with The Hebrides overture and the Sinfonia For Strings #7. Why they performed this raw and academic piece, I don't know. The stormy atmosphere of The Hebrides seemed a more natural lead-in to Midsummer Night's Dream, rather than this symphonic scale-playing.