Classical Music

Felix Mendelssohn's colleagues and contemporaries regarded the grand sonatas as the most important cycle of organ compositions since the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. They interpreted the expressive and dramatic movements of the Sonatas with poetic meaning, based on what a contemporary critic called their spiritual dimensions. This viewpoint challenges the common contemporary understanding and interpretation of these works. Widely considered one of the greatest organ virtuosi of his time, Mendelssohn played the cycle as a whole at an informal premier in Frankfurt in 1845. Conceived and perceived as a single large-scale work, the Sonatas seem to have a symphonic scope. Yet, eighteenth-century central German organs were Mendelssohn's preferred style. The descriptions of Mendelssohn's sensitive touch, differentiated articulation, brilliant technique, and expressive playing, as well as his original metronome indications, inspire us to take a fresh approach to the Sonatas. In recent years, Hans Davidsson's studies of the Sonatas and early nineteenth-century performance have brought new perspectives to our understanding of these works. Traditionally the individual Sonatas might be "authentically" played as single, separate pieces on a German Romantic organ, contemporaneous with Mendelssohn's lifetime. Instead, Davidsson has chosen to play the complete eighteen-movement cycle on an early nineteenth-century organ, an instrument with unique character, sensitivity, transparency, and rich color. For the performer, this instrument brings new interpretive possibilities to the Sonata cycle, based on what is known about Mendelssohn's own performances. For the listener, these new interpretations are given voice on one of the best preserved historical organs in northern Europe- the instrument built for the church in Gammalkil, Sweden, by Pehr Schiorlin in 1806.

Classical Music

Classical Music

COMPLETE STRING SYMPHONIES

"I don't think Mendelssohn gets the attention he deserves," said Paavo Järvi at the start of the 2020-2021 season. Faced with this observation, he undertook to record a complete cycle of Mendelssohn's orchestral works with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra for his second season as Music Director. On the programme are the composer's five symphonies, including the second, known as 'Lobgesang', half-symphony, half-cantata, with the participation of the Zürcher Sing-Akademie, tenor Patrick Grahl and sopranos Chen Reiss and Marie Henriette Reinhold. Finally, A Midsummer Night's Dream, based on Shakespeare's play, the overture to which Mendelssohn composed when he was just 17, concludes this very fine cycle.

REVIEWS:

According to the pianist Andras Schiff, Felix Mendelssohn is a “very underrated” composer. Conductor Paavo Järvi feels the same way: “I don’t think Mendelssohn gets the attention he deserves” the maestro offered before undertaking a survey of the Romantic icon’s five symphonies and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The recording of that project with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich is out now and, while it doesn’t cast Mendelssohn as a radical (which he wasn’t – not exactly), it highlights the strengths of his music and finds ways to put distinctive interpretive stamps on several of these scores.

[The five symphonies offer] a remarkable degree of variety that doesn’t always come through in performance or on disc. Here, though, Järvi manages to get the music to speak persuasively largely by virtue of smart tempos, flexible phrasings, and the highly attentive, virtuosic playing of his Zürich ensemble.

The First Symphony, written when Mendelssohn was just fifteen, is taut and driving, its counterpoint clean and well-shaped, and the slow movement’s lyricism lean and fluent. In the Fifth, Järvi’s approach to the music pays greater dividends.

Again, rhythms are tight, balances clean, and articulations crisp. The finale’s chorale statement is strongly shaped, while that movement’s later contrapuntal textures sound fresh and the music’s chromatic inner lines speak well. Also, the main sections of the outer movements are clearly sculpted: while there’s plenty of drive and intensity in the Tonhalle-Orchester’s playing, the lyrical sections breathe naturally and certain of the music’s antiphonal elements come out pleasingly.

More of the same follows in the Fourth which, for all its first-movement exuberance, manages to sing with warmth and grace. The concluding tarantella snaps right along, its central fugue unfurling with inviting energy.

Conductor, orchestra, and vocal guests seem to have a lot of fun with the Second...tempos are lively, there’s plenty of rhythmic clarity, and a compelling sense of direction throughout...the Zürcher Sing-Akademie’s blend and diction are both excellent. Similarly impressive are the performance’s soloists – sopranos Chen Reiss and Marie Henriette Reinhold, and tenor Patrick Grahl – who imbue their various moments with color and urgency.

Likewise stimulating is Järvi’s take on the Third Symphony. Here, the orchestra revels in the music’s play of color, rhythm, and character. Woodwind figurations in the Scherzo are exquisitely on-point, the subtle play of light and shade in the Adagio is sublime, and the flexibility of phrasing in the outer movements ensures that the score’s larger scaffolding sounds rightly majestic.

Filling out the set is Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a programming choice that neatly frames the symphonies: he wrote the Overture just after completing No. 1 and the rest of the selections around the time he was finishing up No. 3 (which, as we might recall, was really his last).

Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester, joined this time by the ladies of the Zürcher Sing-Akademie and sopranos Katharina Konradi and Sophia Burgos, deliver a reading that’s energetic and, oftentimes, quietly tempestuous. Highlights include a limber, articulate account of the Scherzo; an unsentimental, richly blended, and rhythmically lucid take on the Nocturne; and a bewitching, elfin rendition of the finale.

-- The Arts Fuse

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

It was thanks to his father's penchant for organizing musical concerts in his family's Berlin apartment on Sunday mornings that the 11-year-old Felix Mendelssohn began to compose quite a long series of string symphonies, and also that the works were initially performed. The study of music and composition spurred the young composer on greatly; his diligence as well as his youthful creativity developed early, and he made astonishing progress. In 1821, he wrote the first half of his string symphonies, which together took less than two years to complete. During performances that formed part of the concerts at home, he always took over the direction of the chamber orchestra, which consisted of amateur and professional musicians from the Berlin court orchestra. Ever since their long-lost manuscripts were successfully rediscovered in 1950, Mendelssohn's early string symphonies have been a fixed part of the string and chamber orchestra repertoire. In the youthful freshness and carefreeness of these early works, one can already hear echoes of the instrumental masterpieces by this important symphonic composer of early Romanticism that were soon to follow. This release contains the first six of Mendelssohn's string symphonies in the form of studio recordings made by the M�nchner Rundfunkorchester under it's leader Henry Raudales, a violinist who has won several awards and has made numerous recordings with the orchestra as a conductor and a soloist.

" This 2CD set features a new recording of the complete Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words) by Felix Mendelssohn. These ever popular works, often of deceptively “simple” language and writing, in fact contain a wealth of moods. Hungarian master pianist Balázs Szokolay (b. 1961) has been a piano professor at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest since 1987. repertoire is wide, his discography extensive and he concertizes worldwide as both soloist and chamber musician."

Here, cpo’s complete edition of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s string quartets in gripping interpretations by the Minguet Quartet continues with Vol. 2. At the young age of twelve Mendelssohn composed Twelve Fugues for String Quartet (1821), and in his String Quartet in E flat major composed shortly thereafter a fugue forms the finale. Such contrapuntal pieces pointing to Johann Sebastian Bach were regarded as proofs of compositional proficiency. However, this work was in no way an object of study merely copying classical models. The adagio alone with its melancholy, emphatically intensified melody and quartet texture finely spread over all the instruments radiates a new and very unique sound magic. What is remarkable about Mendelssohn’s Quartet op. 12 is the lyrical character of the first movement, which quite obviously engages in dialogue with Beethoven’s late Quartet op. 127 in the same key. Of course the individual tone of the composer, who was a mere twenty years old at the time, is also very clear. His Four Pieces for String Quartet are not a homogeneous work, even if after his death they came to be known as his String Quartet No. 7 op. 81. The four movements are from different periods of time: the variation movement and the scherzo from 1847, the year of his death, the capriccio from 1843, and the concluding fugue from as early as 1827. The stylistic aspect shifts from movement to movement.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music