David Temple conducts the Crouch End Festival Chorus and London Mozart Players with a formidable group of soloists on this album celebrating the works of the siblings Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel (nee Mendelssohn). Fanny’s cantata Hiob, based on the Book of Job, is the second of three cantatas composed between February and November 1831, although it remained unpublished until 1992. Later in her short career, encouraged by her brother and her friend Robert von Keudell, Fanny did begin to publish her works. The Gartenlieder, Op. 3 for unaccompanied choir were composed in 1846, and inspired by the gardens and summerhouse at the family’s Leipzigerstraße residence, in Berlin, where she held her choir rehearsals. Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht is a secular cantata, a setting of the poem by Goethe, originally performed in 1831. Mendelssohn revised the work extensively in 1843, and it is this later version that is performed here. His Christmas cantata Vom Himmel hoch, based on a Lutheran chorale, was completed in 1831.

This admirable recital forms a sequel to Stephen Hough's Gramophone Award-winning Chandos disc of the A minor and B minor Piano Concertos (4/87). And although the music is less enticing and substantial, the performances less exuberantly virtuosic and elegantly inflected, these are decorous rarities played with an assured brilliance and affection. Hummel's Mozartian rather than Chopinesque bias declares itself most obviously in his Op. 73 Concertino, though even here, at 315" for example, the figuration has a recognizably Hummelian froth and sparkle. Too charming to be vacuous, such surface brio has little in common with Mozart's depth and subtlety, and for music of greater romantic range and ambition we turn to the A flat Concerto (music briefly in Jorge Bolet's repertoire), with its fuller scoring and lavishly decorated solo part. Lovers of a finespun, operatic cantilena will warm to the central "Romanze" and find the final Rondo alla Spagniola, even when it outstays its welcome, more than a prophecy of Chopin's E minor Concerto.

The Gesellschafts Rondo (offered here in a premiere recording) commences in solemn Adagio vein before turning to a more typically bustling and ceremonious Vivace. It may be that Hummel "puffed, blew and perspired" when he played but he won the admiration of Chopin (a hard master to please and one who turned Hummel's animation to rare poetic advantage) and his sheer style is infectious when projected with such unfailing expertise by Howard Shelley in his dual role as pianist and conductor of the London Mozart Players. The recordings are exceptionally well balanced, the acoustic pleasingly spacious.

-- Gramophone [1/1995]