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Untitled Document
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MENDELSSOHN, F. / BRUCH, M. : String Octets |
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Composer: |
Felix Mendelssohn, Max Bruch |
Artist: |
Gil Shaham, Zsolt Fejervari |
Ensemble: |
Sejong, Auer String Quartet, Kodaly Quartet, Solisti Filarmonici Italiani, I |
Label: |
Naxos |
Catalogue No.: |
8.557270 |
Format: |
CD |
Barcode: |
0747313227020 |
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Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847): Octet in E flat
major, 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 Abraham
Mendelssohn and grandson of the great Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, Felix
Mendelssohn, 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 the
wide cultural opportunities that his family offered, through their own interests
and connections.
Manifested in a number of directions, Mendelssohn's early
gifts, included marked musical precocity, both as a composer and as a
performer, at a remarkably early age. These exceptional abilities received
every encouragement from his family and their friends, although Abraham Mendelssohn
entertained early doubts about the desirability of his son taking the
profession of musician. These reservations were in part put to rest by the
advice of Cherubini in Paris and by the increasing signs of the boy's musical
abilities and interests.
Mendelssohn's early manhood brought the opportunity to
travel, 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 in
the Lower Rhine Festival in Düsseldorf 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 years
there, until his death at the age of 38 on 4 November 1847, six months after
the death of his gifted and beloved sister Fanny.
Mendelssohn owed his early training as a violinist to his
teacher and friend Eduard Rietz. Born in Berlin in 1802, the son of a violinist
in the Berlin Court Orchestra, Rietz had joined the same orchestra in 1819,
leaving it in 1825, after disagreements with the conductor Spontini, to found the
Berlin Philharmonic Society the following year, leading its semi-amateur
orchestra in concerts with the Berlin Singakademie. This was the ensemble that
he led in Mendelssohn's famous revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion in 1829, an
enterprise in which he and his cellist brother Julius had collaborated by
helping to write out the parts for the performance. Mendelssohn dedicated to
Rietz his Violin Concerto in D minor, the Octet and the Violin Sonata in F
minor, Op. 4. Rietz died of consumption in 1832 and Mendelssohn then dedicated to
his memory the slow movement of his String Quintet, Op. 18.
The Octet in E flat major, in which Mendelssohn himself on
occasion took the second viola part, was written in 1825 and immediately
precedes in order of composition the concert overture A Midsummer Night's
Dream, with which the Scherzo has obvious affinities. It was conceived in
orchestral terms and is an astonishing feat of virtuosity from a
sixteen-year-old, innovative in instrumentation and in its treatment of the
instruments. Considerable demands are made of the first violin, in a part
written originally for Rietz, for whom the work was intended as a birthday present.
Much use is made of the ascending figuration of the first subject, which is
fully exploited, while a secondary theme makes its appearance, at first in
sixths between the fourth violin and first viola. The repeated exposition is
duly followed by a central development, a chance for changes of texture,
dynamic variation and changes of mood. The music mounts to a climax of largely
unanimous activity before the first theme returns in recapitulation. The C minor
slow movement has been variously analysed. It is opened by violas and cellos,
answered by the violins, as the principal melodic material unwinds, in what
might seem the first subject of a modified sonata-form movement. Its ethereal
beauty is followed by the G minor Scherzo, seemingly, according to the composer's
sister Fanny, inspired by lines from Goethe's Faust, the Walpurgis Night
Dream, 'Clouds and mist pass / it grows bright above. / Air in the bushes and
wind in the reeds / - and all is
dispersed' (Wolkenzug und Nebelflor / erhellen sich von oben.
/ Luft im Laub und Wind im Rohr / - und alles ist zerstoben). The busy figuration is continued
in the final fugal Presto, its principal subject mounting through the instruments,
from the initial entry of the second cello. The perpetual motion of the
movement nevertheless allows the addition of other thematic elements and
explicit references to the preceding Scherzo.
Today Max Bruch is generally known only as the composer of
works for the violin. In addition to the Violin Concerto in G minor, the
popularity of which continues, and, to the annoyance of the composer,
eventually overshadowed much of his other work, we hear from time to time the Scottish
Fantasy and the Second Violin Concerto. The fact that Bruch, in his
day, was famous for his large-scale choral works is forgotten. Between 1870 and
1900 there were numerous performances of works such as Odysseus, Frithjof
or Das Lied von der Glocke, earning for the composer a reputation
that momentarily outshone that of Brahms.
Max Bruch was born in Cologne on 6 January, 1838, in the
same year as Bizet. He studied there with Ferdinand Hiller and Carl Reinecke.
Extended journeys at home and abroad as a student were followed by a longer
stay in Mannheim, where his opera Loreley was performed in 1863, a work
based on a libretto by Geibel and originally intended for Mendelssohn, which
brought him to the attention of a wider public. Bruch's first official appointments
were as Kapellmeister, first in Koblenz from 1865 to 1867, and then in
Sondershausen until 1870, followed by a longer stay in Berlin and a period from
1873 to 1878 in Bonn, when he dedicated himself to composition. After a short
time as director of the
Sternscher Gesangverein in Berlin, in 1880 he was appointed conductor of the Liverpool
Philharmonic Orchestra, where he succeeded Julius Benedict, leaving England in 1883 to become director of the Orchesterverein in Breslau. In 1891 he moved finally to Berlin and took over master-classes in composition, Respighi being one of his pupils. He
retired in 1911 to devote himself to composition, although now essentially
writing in a traditional style that seemed to have passed. He died in Berlin on 2 October, 1920.
Bruch's Octet in B flat major, one of his last works, was
written in January and February 1920, seven months before the composer's death,
and apparently a reworking of a recently composed string quintet. It is
seemingly modelled on Mendelssohn's Octet, although the later substitution of a
double bass for the second cello made the work into a possible item in string
orchestra repertoire, described then as Concerto for String Orchestra. The Octet
was played to the composer by the violinist Willy Hess and his pupils.
The tranquil principal theme of the opening Allegro moderato
is entrusted to the first viola, continued by the first violin and leading
to a second subject of more forceful contour. The central development of this
broadly sonata-form movement returns at first to the mood of the opening, with
other earlier material explored before a suggested return of the first theme,
postponed until its final return in a more grandiose form, after a unison
climax, as in Mendelssohn's Octet. The slow movement almost seems to recall
Schumann's Piano Quintet in the sinister suggestion of its E flat minor
opening, before the entry of the first violin with the principal theme of the
movement. The secondary thematic material, in B major and marked Andante con
molto di moto, is introduced by the first violin with an accompaniment that
includes the plucked notes of the first cello. The original key and theme
returns with the first and third violins in octaves over a more elaborate accompaniment,
and after a brief transitional passage in B major the second theme returns, now
in E flat major, bringing the movement to a serene end. The ominous opening of
the last movement is soon contradicted at the entry of the first violin. There
is contrast of mood and key in what follows, with an effectively lyrical
secondary theme introduced by the first cello, aided by the second viola, later
to return in the appropriate final key in a movement that in other respects has
something of Mendelssohn's perpetual motion and lightness of texture about it.
Keith Anderson
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