 | No. 385 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast385 |
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Over the
last couple of weeks on our podcasting channel, we’ve spent time revisiting
posts of music by Felix Mendelssohn. Today’s Friday podcast is the first in
several months that doesn’t revisit Tuesday programs, ad proposes a pair of
double concerti by Mendelssohn.
Mendelssohn
was considered by many of his time to be a prodigy comparable only to the young
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Besides being a brilliant piano virtuoso, his
composition took a firm step forward in musical development. At the age of
eleven, he had written a trio for strings, a violin and piano sonata, two piano
sonatas and the beginning of a third, three more for four hands, four for
organ, three songs (lieder), and a cantata. While aged 12 to 14, Mendelssohn
composed twelve string symphonies; the two concerti proposed here today are
contemporaneous to that period.
The
Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Strings in D minor was written in 1823 when
Mendelssohn was 14 years old. Mendelssohn composed the work to be performed for
a private concert on May 25, 1823 at the Mendelssohn home in Berlin with his
violin teacher and friend, Eduard Rietz. Following this private performance,
Mendelssohn revised the scoring, adding winds and timpani and is possibly the
first work in which Mendelssohn used winds and timpani in a large work. It
remained unpublished during Mendelssohn's lifetime and it wasn't until 1999
when a critical edition of the piece was available. This concerto was
previously paired with two Mozart double concerti in an early podcast, with
different soloists and orchestra.
The
Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in E Major (the first of two he composed
for that combination in this early phase of his career) was written in the late
summer and early fall of 1823. It was first performed in December 1823 with
Felix and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn as the two soloists. Regarded as
immature by the composer, the work remained unpublished during his lifetime,
though he substantially revised it, perhaps a decade after the première, in
which form the Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
published it in 1961. The version I chose here is the world premiere recording
of the concerto’s first movement restored to its original form thanks to
research by musicologist Steve Lindeman.
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