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Felix Mendelssohn: Choral Works (Pentatone)
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel: Lieder (First Hand Data)
★★☆☆☆/★★★★☆
It’s not typically one will get an opportunity to match two composers who’re brother and sister. In reality, other than the Mendelssohns, there’s hardly one other occasion besides Mozart and his inauspicious sister, Nannerl. Within the Mendelssohn household, Fanny was the primary to indicate expertise, solely to be silenced by her father as soon as younger Felix displayed a boyish genius that many likened to Mozart’s. Fanny went off, acquired married, acted as household conscience and shocked Felix by taking over composing once more in her thirties.
The works on these two albums are disparate in tone and intent. Felix’s psalms, sung by the Leipzig radio choir beneath Philipp Ahmann, are public declamations for divine worship. Formal and simply singable, they endure from the self-restraint a religious individual feels when addressing the Creator. Mendelssohn is out to impress the worshipful bourgeoisie and succeeds, roughly. Nowhere, nevertheless, on this compilation does one really feel the spark of Felix on hearth.
Fanny’s songs are written for herself and the drawing room. Most have solely just lately come to mild. Half of the songs listed here are premiere recordings. While not having impose or impress, Fanny’s songs have a fragile patina, at occasions introspective, all the time insistently communicative. 5 are titled ‘Sehnsucht’, or ‘longing’, clearly an expression of repressed hopes, romantic or vocational.
Three English singers – Tim Parker-Langston, Stephanie Wake-Edwards and Jennifer Parker – recorded them early this 12 months within the Mendelssohn Home in Leipzig on what seems like a interval piano. The singing is admirable, the atmosphere distinctive. My solely gripe is that the composer is titled on the quilt by her married identify ‘Fanny Hensel’, reasonably than a Mendelssohn, or Mendelssohn-Hensel.
Fanny, a a lot stronger character than her brother, was simply starting to benefit from the satisfaction of seeing her first works in print when she died of a stroke, aged 42. Felix, inconsolable, adopted her inside a 12 months (I write extra of their uncommon relationship in my ebook, Genius and Anxiousness).
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Norman Lebrecht is likely one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Avenue Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning in opposition to human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
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