Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto In E Minor / Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto In D Major

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Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809 - 1847)Violin Concerto in E Minor, Opus 64 Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840- 1893) Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 35 Felix Mendelssohn was born with a silverif not completely kosher spoon in his mouth. The son of a banker, AbrahamMendelssohn, who was to turn Christian, he was the grandson of thedistinguished Jewish writer Moses Mendelssohn.As a boy Mendelssohn profited not onlyfrom the comfortable circumstances of his family, but also from their culturalinterests and wide connections. It was in an atmosphere of tolerance andencouragement that his musical abilities were to flourish, and whateverreservations his father may at one time have held about the advisability ofbecoming a musician were quietened by the positive counsel of old Cherubini,the dour director of the Paris Conservatoire, impressed, perhaps, by the familymoney.Mendelssohn was a precocious musician anda prolific composer, even as a child. He was to couple all the qualities of aneducated man, a lively mind and a quick eye, with further ability as aconductor, and moved to Leipzig at the age of twenty-six as conductor of theGewandhaus Orchestra. It was to Leipzig, where he established a Conservatory ofMusic, that he later returned, after less happy experiences in Berlin, wherehis parents had settled in 1812 and where his family hoped he too would makehis career.Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, inthe words of the great violinist Joachim the dearest of all German violinconcertos, the heart's jewel, was written for Ferdinand David, leader of theLeipzig Orchestra, during the late summer of 1844. Its composition discharged adebt of gratitude to the violinist and expressed, too, something of the reliefthe composer felt at the end of a period that had involved him in thetroublesome musical politics of Berlin. Leipzig was home.The concerto, the second Mendelssohn hadwritten for the instrument, opens, after two brief bars of orchestralaccompaniment, with the entry of the soloist playing the principal theme, whichis only then taken up by the full orchestra. There are other structuralinnovations in the movement, with the placing of the cadenza at the end of thecentral development section, instead of the end of the movement, and with theuse of a sustained bassoon note to link the first movement to the second.The deftly scored slow movement, ofmasterly economy in means, leads to a brief transitional section, followed by aspirited last movement that offers a fine example of that lightness of touchthat Mendelssohn had shown time and again, not least in his famous Overture toShakespere's A Midsummer Night's Dream.Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky was born in1840 in Kamsko-Votkinsk, the second son of a mining engineer, Ilya Petrovich,who was in charge of the Votkinsk iron foundry, and his second wife, a youngwoman of part-French extraction, from whom the composer seems to have inheritedboth an interest in music and a weakness of nerves, In 1844, with the arrivalof a French gove