Mendelssohn: Cello Sonatas Nos. 1 And 2 / Variations Concertantes

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Cat No: 8550655

Release Date: 12 January 1999

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 4891030506558

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: MENDELSSOHN

Description
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809 - 1847)Cello Sonata No. 1 in B Flat Major, Op. 45Variations concertantes, Op. 17Cello Sonata No. 2 in D Major, Op. 58Song without Words, Op. 109Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the great Jewish thinker of the Enlightenment, was born in Hamburg in 1809, the son of a prosperous banker. His family was influential in cultural circles, and he and his sister were educated in an environment that encouraged both musical and general cultural interests. At the same time the extensive acquaintance of the Mendelssohns among artists and men of letters brought an unusual breadth of mind, a stimulus to natural curiosity.Much of Mendelssohn's childhood was passed in Berlin, where his parents moved when he was three, to escape Napoleonic invasion. There he took lessons from Goethe's much admired Zelter, who introduced him to the old poet in Weimar. The choice of a career in music was eventually decided on the advice of Cherubini, consulted by Abraham Mendelssohn in Paris, where he was director of the Conservatoire. There followed a period of further education, a Grand Tour of Europe that took him to Italy and north to Scotland. His professional career began in earnest with his appointment as general director of music in Düsseldorf in 1833.Mendelssohn's subsequent career was intense and brief. He set tied in Leipzig as conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts, and was instrumental in establishing the Conservatory there. Briefly lured to Berlin by the King of Prussia and by the importunity of his family, he spent an unsatisfactory year or so as director of the music section of the Academy of Arts, providing music for a revival of classical drama under royal encouragement. The appointment he was glad to relinquish in 1844, later returning to his old position in Leipzig, where he died in 1847.As a composer Mendelssohn possessed a perfect technical command of the resources available to him and was always able to write music that is felicitous, apt and often remarkably economical in the way it achieves its effects. Mendelssohn had, like the rest of his family, accepted Christian baptism, a ceremony Heine once described as a ticket of admission into European culture. Nevertheless he encountered anti-Semitic prejudice, as others were to, and false ideas put about in his own life-time have left some trace in modern repetitions of accusations of superficiality for which there is no real justification.The first of Mendelssohn's two sonatas for cello and piano was written in 1838 for the composer's brother Paul. The first movement opens with a statement of the first bars by both instruments, the first motif developed in a passage leading to the second subject and contributing largely to the central development. The G minor slow movement develops gradually from its own opening figure, in music of increasing elaboration. The last movement starts with a cello statement of the principal theme, which frames episode
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