Mendelssohn / Bruch: String Octets

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Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847): Octet in E flatmajor, Op. 20 (1825)Max Bruch (1838-1920): Octet in B flat major, Op. posth. (1920) Born in Hamburg in 1809, eldest son of the banker AbrahamMendelssohn and grandson of the great Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, FelixMendelssohn, who took the additional name Bartholdy on his baptism as a Christian,was brought up in Berlin, where his family settled in 1812. Here he enjoyed thewide cultural opportunities that his family offered, through their own interestsand connections.Manifested in a number of directions, Mendelssohn's earlygifts, included marked musical precocity, both as a composer and as aperformer, at a remarkably early age. These exceptional abilities receivedevery encouragement from his family and their friends, although Abraham Mendelssohnentertained early doubts about the desirability of his son taking theprofession of musician. These reservations were in part put to rest by theadvice of Cherubini in Paris and by the increasing signs of the boy's musicalabilities and interests.Mendelssohn's early manhood brought the opportunity totravel, as far south as Naples and as far north as The Hebrides, with Italy and Scotland both providing the inspiration for later symphonies. His career involved him inthe Lower Rhine Festival in D??sseldorf and a period as city director of music,followed, in 1835, by appointment as conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. Here he was able to continue the work he had started in Berlin six years earlier,when he had conducted a revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion. Leipzig was to provide a degree of satisfaction that he could not find in Berlin, where he returned at the invitation of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1841. In Leipzig once more, in 1843, he established a new Conservatory, spending his final yearsthere, until his death at the age of 38 on 4 November 1847, six months afterthe death of his gifted and beloved sister Fanny.Mendelssohn owed his early training as a violinist to histeacher and friend Eduard Rietz. Born in Berlin in 1802, the son of a violinistin the Berlin Court Orchestra, Rietz had joined the same orchestra in 1819,leaving it in 1825, after disagreements with the conductor Spontini, to found theBerlin Philharmonic Society the following year, leading its semi-amateurorchestra in concerts with the Berlin Singakademie. This was the ensemble thathe led in Mendelssohn's famous revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion in 1829, anenterprise in which he and his cellist brother Julius had collaborated byhelping to write out the parts for the performance. Mendelssohn dedicated toRietz his Violin Concerto in D minor, the Octet and the Violin Sonata in Fminor, Op. 4. Rietz died of consumption in 1832 and Mendelssohn then dedicated tohis memory the slow movement of his String Quintet, Op. 18.The Octet in E flat major, in which Mendelssohn himself onoccasion took the second viola part, was written in 1825 and immediatelyprecedes in order of