Mendelssohn: Violin Concertos
Roberto Prosseda, Shlomo Mintz & Symfonieorkest van Vlaanderen
Decca / HQ|NORTHSTAR
Catalogue DECCA4818483
(Low Resolution excerpts)
THE YOUNG MENDELSSOHN A kind of second Mozart: these were the words used to describe the twelveyear-old Felix Mendelssohn by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, no less, a man who in 1763 heard the young Mozart perform when he was barely seven.
In May 1823, Mendelssohn had completed the Concerto in D minor for violin, piano and orchestra, MWV O4, intending the solo parts for himself and his friend and teacher Eduard Rietz. Mendelssohn decided to revise and amend the score, adding winds and timpani. The work is in three parts, and owes much to the examples of Mozart and Weber (especially in the more brilliant passages), with the clear addition of that of Beethoven.
At the end of 1822 Mendelssohn conceived the second work on this CD: the Concerto for violin and strings in D minor, MWV O3, the solo part of which was written also for Eduard Rietz. The concerto has survived in two slightly different manuscript versions. The first, which can be considered definitive, came into the possession of Clara Schumann in 1890. Today it is held in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, along with other autographs of the composer’s juvenilia. The second, which has only a sketch of the third movement, was given by the composer’s widow Cécile Jeanrenaud to the violinist Ferdinand David, Mendelssohn’s friend and collaborator. In London, in the spring of 1951 the rare book dealer Albi Rosenthal showed this manuscript to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who produced the first edition, published by Peters, and gave the first modern performance, at Carnegie Hall in New York on 4 February 1952.
The String symphony no.10 in B minor, MWV N10 was completed on 18 May 1823. It consists of a single movement which, according to some scholars, might originally have been completed by two further movements that have since been lost.
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