THE YOUNG FELIX MENDELSSOHNPiano Quartets, Op. 1-3Sextet, Op. 110Clarinet, Violin & Viola SonatasThe Atlantis Ensemble – Jaap Schröder The Romantics 13

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THE YOUNG FELIX MENDELSSOHN

Piano Quartets, Op. 1-3

Piano Sextet, Op. posth. 110*

Sonata for violin & fortepiano, Op. 4

Sonata for clarinet & fortepiano (1824)

Sonata for viola and fortepiano*** (1824)

The Atlantis EnsembleJaap Schröder violin: Matteo Gofriller, Venice c.1700;

viola***, Joseph Curtin, Ann Arbor, MI Penelope Crawford fortepiano: Conrad Graf, Vienna, 1835

Daniel Foster viola: Luciano Bini, 1980Peter Bucknell* viola: anon. Tyrolean, 18th centuryEnid Sutherland cello: anon. Tyrolean, 18th century

Owen Watkins clarinet: Joel Robinson, NY, after H. GrenserAnne Trout* double bass: anon. Tyrolean, c. 1840

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DISC 1

Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 1 (1824)

1 Allegro vivace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9'50

2 Adagio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7'17

3 Scherzo - Presto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5'55

4 Allegro moderato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7'43

Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 2 (1825)

5 Allegro molto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10'37

6 Adagio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6'04

7 Intermezzo – Allegro moderato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3'42

8 Allegro molto vivace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8'12

Total Time: 59’25

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DISC 2

Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor, Op. 3 (1826)

1 Allegro molto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9'50

2 Andante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6'57

3 Allegro molto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5'59

4 Finale – Allegro vivace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11'00

Piano Sextet in D major, Op. (posth.) 110 (1824)

5 Allegro vivace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12'40

6 Adagio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4’43

7 Menuetto & Trio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2'45

8 Allegro vivace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11’31

Total Time: 65’32

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DISC 3

Sonata in F minor for violin & fortepiano, Op. 4 (1823)

1 Adagio – Allegro moderato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7'38

2 Poco adagio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7'08

3 Allegro agitato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5'30

Sonata in E flat major for clarinet & fortepiano (1824)

4 Adagio-Allegro moderato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12'30

5 Andante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4'48

6 Allegro moderato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6'34

Sonata in C minor for viola & fortepiano (1824)

7 Adagio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8'01

8 Menuetto. Allegro molto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7'02

9 Andante con Variazioni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14'18

Total Time: 73’36

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The Young Felix Mendelssohn

History has produced few musical geniuses who could rival the formidable precocity, versatility,and sheer intellectual acumen of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847). He won renown

as a composer who bridged classicism and romanticism, as a “modern” conductor who was one ofthe first to use a baton, and as a pianist and organist whose improvisations were legendary. (He wasalso a skilled violinist and violist as well as a scholar and editor of the music of J. S. Bach andHandel.) The range and totality of his accomplishments, which extended to painting and drawing,and to poetry and the art of translation bear comparison to the intellectual breadth of the great polymaths, two of whom, Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt, he counted as intimatefriends. The anni mirabiles of Mendelssohn’s early years are usually viewed as 1825 and 1826, when,at ages sixteen and seventeen, he produced two inimitable, breakthrough masterpieces, the Octet Op. 20 and Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream Op. 21, favorite, enduring works of the concert repertoire.

Scarcely less impressive, at least in quantity, was the productivity of the fifteen year old. Onthe occasion of his birthday on February 3, 1824, Mendelssohn’s composition teacher, CarlFriedrich Zelter, declared his prize pupil a journeyman in the brotherhood of J. S. Bach, Haydn,and Mozart. A few days later, Mendelssohn premiered at the family residence in Berlin his fourthopera, Der Onkel aus Boston, and then proceeded to write a viola sonata and begin a symphony forfull orchestra, eventually published in the 1830s as the Symphony in C minor, Op. 11 (it had beenpreceded by a series of twelve string sinfonias). In March he concluded a Salve Regina for sopranoand string orchestra, before turning in April and May to the Piano Sextet in D major. Only thesymphony Mendelssohn deemed worthy of publication; the sextet had to await a posthumous releasein 1868 as Op. 110, the Salve Regina did not appear until late in the twentieth century, and DerOnkel aus Boston still remains unpublished, though its twenty-first century premiere was given asrecently as 2005. Though none of these works attains the level of the Octet or Midsummer Night’sDream of 1825 and 1826, they are significant for another reason, for they testify to the remarkablecompositional range and fluency of the young prodigy. Indeed, only Mozart and Schubert attainedcomparable levels of expertise in as broad a selection of musical genres at such early ages.

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The Three Piano Quartets, Op. 1-3

Mendelssohn composed and performed chamber music his entire career. Among his earliestcompositions to survive is a fantasy-like Recitativo in D minor for piano and strings from

1820, which the composer began to notate shortly after he turned eleven. Among the last worksthat he finished was the turbulent String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80, written in Switzerland in1847, after the death of his sister Fanny Hensel, and cast in an especially dissonant style usuallythought to give voice to the distraught composer’s grief. At the time of his death, he was evidentlybeginning to sketch a string quartet in D minor, though nothing has survived of this effort.

As a pianist, violinist, and violist, Mendelssohn was a committed performer of chamber musicand fully used all the venues at his disposal for indulging in one of his favorite pastimes. Thus, theMendelssohn residence on Leipzigerstrasse in Berlin, where his parents organized Sunday musicalesto showcase their son’s compositions, and where his sister led a distinguished concert series duringthe 1830s and 1840s, became a locus for chamber music that attracted many of the best musiciansof the time, including touring virtuosi who visited Berlin. In Paris, Mendelssohn read throughMozart piano concerti with the string quartet of Pierre Baillot, in intimate chamber settings, andin London, he appeared at concerts of the Beethoven Quartet Society. Last but not least, at theGewandhaus in Leipzig, center of Mendelssohn’s career for much of the period between 1835 and1847, the composer supplemented the famed orchestral subscription series with one devoted to chamber music. At these Abendunterhaltungen, or “evening entertainments,” Mendelssohn frequently participated, usually as a pianist, but occasionally as a string player as well. So it was thatat one concert in the 1840s, which featured the Spohr Double Quartet in D minor and theMendelssohn Octet, the composer took his place among the musicians and performed a violin or viola part, much to the delight of the music-loving Leipzigers, who knew him primarily as a composer, conductor, pianist, and organist.

Chamber music was thus a constant in Mendelssohn’s life, and he returned throughout hiscareer to explore its various genres—ranging in size from duo sonatas (he produced examples forviolin, viola, cello, and clarinet) to piano trios, piano quartets and string quartets, string quintets,a piano sextet, and, arguably the ne plus ultra, the Octet, which Mendelssohn instructed was to beperformed in a symphonic style that, in a sense, tested the boundaries between chamber and

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orchestral music. Chamber music afforded Mendelssohn a meaningful link to the musical past, and was of consequence to a composer who founded his own musical style upon a progression ofeighteenth and nineteenth-century German composers that he esteemed, principally J. S. Bach,Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Carl Maria von Weber. Reinforcing this traditional outlook—oneside of Mendelssohn’s complex musical personality—was the influence of his teacher Carl FriedrichZelter, who recommended that his pupil model his composition exercises on exemplary Germanworks of the past, including the string quartets of Haydn, advice that seems to have held the youngmusician in good stead as he acquired at a precocious age the mastery of his craft.

When, at age fourteen in 1823, Mendelssohn published his Opus 1, he chose to come forthbefore the musical world with a piano quartet in C minor, and then produced in quick successiontwo additional piano quartets, in F minor and B minor, as his Op. 2 and 3. In fact, Mendelssohn’sOp. 1 was not his first essay in the genre. An earlier example, this one in D minor, was completedaround June 1821, just when Carl Maria von Weber was visiting Berlin to direct the premiere ofhis much anticipated “romantic” opera, Der Freischütz. In three movements, the quartet does notcome up to the level of Op. 1; nevertheless, it appears to have been the work that the young composer performed later that year for Goethe in Weimar, prompting the aging poet to make a startling comparison between Zelter’s prize pupil and Mozart: “what your pupil already accomplishes,bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time, that the cultivated talk of a grown-up persondoes to the prattle of a child.” As if reinforcing Goethe’s pronouncement, the following yearMendelssohn completed a second, considerably more sophisticated and accomplished piano quartet, in C minor, destined to become his opus primum. He would dedicate it to Prince AntoniHenryk Radziwill, one of Beethoven’s former patrons, and a dedicated cellist and composer.

It is perhaps appropriate that for his compositional debut Mendelssohn chose to invoke achamber-music genre in which Mozart had left two masterful examples, the Piano Quartets in G minor and E-flat major, K. 478 and 493. But it seems that another work by Mozart left a specific mark on the Op. 1, in particular in the external movements, where Mendelssohn recalledmotives and themes from Mozart’s Piano Sonata K. 457, also in C minor. To begin with, the firstmovement of the quartet opens with a rising C-minor triad, balanced a few bars later with a risingtriad on the dominant, an initial gambit suspiciously similar to the opening of the first movement

of Mozart’s sonata. What is more, for the monothematic finale, Mendelssohn crafts a theme whosecontours clearly resemble the first theme of Mozart’s finale. These and other reminiscences werenot lost upon an early reviewer of the composition, who described Mendelssohn in the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung as a young, gallant virtuoso (“ein junger wacker Virtuos”) who hadchosen Mozart as his model. Avoiding specific comparisons between compositions, the anonymous reviewer rather singled out three Mozartean elements that Mendelssohn’s musicevinced: 1) strictness of form, 2) division of themes into clearly articulated antecedent and consequent phrases, so that the listener could deduce the consequent phrase from its antecedent,and 3) ingratiating simplicity of the musical ideas.

Nevertheless, the classically turned phrases and carefully proportioned balance thatMendelssohn derived from Mozart in fact proved a springboard for further stylistic experimenta-tion that exceeded the limits of Zelter’s conservative instruction. The lyrical, singing second themesuggests much more of Carl Maria von Weber than any eighteenth-century sources, and scatteredthroughout Op. 1 are traces of another composer’s influence—that of Beethoven—which more andmore began to manifest itself in dramatic fashion in Mendelssohn’s music of the early 1820s. Thesigns are clear enough. In the first movement, for example, we might cite the dramatic fortepassage after the quiet opening; the insistent close of the exposition, with its emphatic fortissimo;

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and in the closing bars a triplet passage suspiciously reminiscent of the finale of Beethoven’s PianoSonata in F minor, Op. 2 No. 1. The slow movement contains some chromatic, enharmonic progressions that recall Beethoven, while the finale offers turbulent, insistent passagework thatbetrays its source. When, at the very end, after a series of cascading C-minor and diminished-seventh harmonies we hear rising scales in the piano, the effect is somewhat like the ending ofBeethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, also in C minor.

For all its debts, Mendelssohn’s Op. 1 also shows clear signs of his emerging style, especially inthe brisk scherzo, where we find the forerunner of the fleet-footed, elfin scherzo that Mendelssohnunabashedly explored just a few years later in the Octet (1825) and Midsummer Night’s DreamOverture (1826). Mendelssohn cast the scherzo of the quartet in duple meter, and assigned the leadto the piano part, characterized by rapid, scurrying scales and passagework in the high register, usually doubled at the octave, though the composer could not totally resist the urge to explore hismaterial in imitative counterpoint, with lively exchanges between all four instruments.

In the case of the Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 2, dedicated to Mendelssohn’s teacher andpublished in 1823, the young composer’s Beethovenian preoccupations only intensified, eventhough Zelter had proclaimed his prize pupil a journeyman in the tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and “old Bach.” There is in Mendelssohn’s music again an emphasis in the application of sonataform on the bridge and closing sections; the coda in the first movement is now further extended to accommodate a culminating stretto section, and attains the (for the time) extreme dynamicmarking fff, which Beethoven had used in his Eighth Symphony. What is more, Mendelssohnexplores the uppermost register of his instrument, attaining at one point a high e-flat, as if toexhaust the pitches at his disposal and test the boundaries of register, a compositional stance reminiscent of Beethoven. The second theme of the first movement recalls that of Beethoven’sWaldstein Sonata, Op. 53, and the propulsive opening of the finale has a distinctive, unusual harmonic coupling of F minor and G-flat major that reveals the fourteen-year-old’s knowledge ofBeethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, Op. 57. But for all the dramatic gestures and emphatic harmoniesthe quartet shows other influences at work, for example the brilliant, transparent virtuoso styles of Weber and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, which occasionally come to the fore. And in a notabledeparture from the more traditional design of Op. 1, Mendelssohn replaces the anticipated

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third-movement scherzo with a subdued, miniature movement titled Intermezzo that functions as a brief intermission between the weightier slow movement and dramatic finale.

Op. 2 exhibits one other noteworthy feature—much of its thematicism is interconnected andrelated, not just within but also between individual movements. Mendelssohn derives most of hismaterial from the expressive opening motive in the violin, which features an ascending leap fromC to A-flat followed by a descent through G to F and E-natural. This initial figure inspires the lyrical second theme (which, as noted above, recalls Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata), so that the firstmovement is monothematically conceived. The primary theme of the second movement, set in alush D-flat major, also features a prominent A-flat, now descending through G-flat to F, while in thethird movement, Mendelssohn begins by reviving the ascending sixth, C-A-flat. And in the finale,the energetic rising theme of the violin, expanded to span nearly two octaves, begins on C and risesto a high A-flat, and thus reanimates the opening gesture of the first movement. In short, A-flat actsas a basic structural pitch common to all four movements, and further underscores Mendelssohn’sconception of the piano quartet as an organic whole, with relationships between its various parts.

A similar compositional aesthetic influenced the Piano Quartet in B minor, Op. 3, by far themost ambitious of the three quartets, and Mendelssohn’s first published work to exhibit fully hismature style. Completed in 1825 when he was sixteen, Op. 3 was performed in April by the composer in Paris for Luigi Cherubini, the indomitable, authoritative directeur of the Conservatorywith whom Hector Berlioz would have some contentious encounters a few years later. Unfortunatelymarring the performance of the quartet was a noisy member of the audience who brandished atinsel-adorned fan. Still, the usually chary of praise Cherubini astonished the audience with thisremarkable, positive verdict: Çe garçon est riche, il fera bien; il fait même déjà bien, mais il dépensetrop de son argent, il met trop d’étoffe dans son habit…Je lui parlerai alors il fera bien! (“This lad isrich; he will do well. He has already done well, but he spends too much of his money, and he putstoo much fabric into his clothes…I shall speak to him—he will do well!”). A few weeks later, in May, it was Goethe’s turn to receive the dedication of Op. 3 and to hear it in a private performance in Weimar. The aging poet immediately wrote to Zelter in Berlin, and praised thecomposition as “the graceful embodiment of that beautiful, rich, energetic soul which so astonishedme when you first made me acquainted with it.”

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The Piano Quartet in B minor is especially impressive for its Beethovenian length, arrestingthemes, and formal experimentation. In the first movement, Mendelssohn eschews the classicalrepeat of the exposition (observed in Opus 1 and 2) and instead dramatically expands its closingsection. The development opens with a surprise: the tempo abruptly shifts to Più Allegro, and afresh thematic gesture, nervously rising in the piano, seems to divert our attention from the conventional unfolding of the sonata principle. After the recapitulation, the new subject returns in an elongated coda, with tonal meanderings reminiscent of the development. In effect, what Mendelssohn has done is to modify ternary sonata form (exposition, development, and recapitulation) into a four-part Beethovenian scheme (exposition, development, recapitulation, andcoda), with the exposition balanced by the recapitulation, and the development, by the coda. It isan approach Mendelssohn no doubt would have observed in the monumental first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

The other endpoint of Op. 3 is a massive finale of nearly five hundred measures, a formallyexperimental blend of sonata and rondo forms animated by bristling string tremolos and brilliantpiano writing. Here again, Mendelssohn turns the development into a culminating coda. Inmarked contrast are the song-like, monothematic Andante in E major and gossamer-like thirdmovement in F-sharp minor, originally labeled Intermezzo (as in Op. 2), but now expanded into afull-fledged scherzo with a contrasting, and repeated, trio, so that the form falls into the five-partplan ABABA. The movement adumbrates the scherzo of the Octet, finished just months later in1825, and the elfin music of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. The whirling pianoarabesques begin by describing a turning, spinning figure, which is nothing other than a capricioustransformation of the opening bars of the first movement, which also offer a turn figure. Not byaccident does Mendelssohn recall this figure in the closing bars of the finale four times in thestrings, reinforcing the thematic unity of the entire composition, and rounding out the whole.

Within months of completing his final piano quartet, Mendelssohn was hard at work on aneven more ambitious chamber work, the Octet, finished in October for the birthday of his friendand violin instructor, Eduard Rietz. The Octet is usually viewed as the first undisputed masterpiecefrom Mendelssohn’s pen, though a compelling argument could certainly be made for Op. 3 to sharethis honor. Both are extraordinary products of an extraordinary prodigy. As it happened, in 1832

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both works experienced unusual receptions in Paris, still seething with political ferment after theJuly Revolution of 1830, that had produced the so-called “citizen king,” Louis Philippe. By someanomaly, the Scherzo of the Octet, a musical depiction of the Walpurgisnight’s Dream sequence inGoethe’s Faust, where Faust rides up the Brocken with Mephistopheles, was chosen to accompanya Mass to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Beethoven’s death. And Op. 3 was performed ata meeting of the St. Simonians, a utopian political sect that preached the “emancipation of theflesh.” When Mendelssohn learned that the music of his quartet had been confiscated by thepolice, he mused that the relatively conventional slow movement might be spared, though theother, “revolutionary” movements would no doubt require a jury trial.

Piano Sextet, Op. (posth.) 110

The Sextet has always occupied a somewhat anomalous position in Mendelssohn’s early oeuvre.First, very little is known about its early compositional history—for example, about what

stimulated its composition or, indeed, when it was first performed. Second, vexing questionsremain as to why Mendelssohn chose the unusual genre of the piano sextet. And third, the workhas always remained in the shadows of the much more celebrated Octet, the magnitude andcompositional scope of which dwarfs its earlier sibling; in short, the Sextet is usually seen as a waystation in Mendelssohn’s early maturity, a work pointing irretrievably to the Octet.

Mendelssohn’s letters are conspicuously silent about the Sextet, and the surviving autographscore (in the composer’s Nachlass at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), dated at the end May 10, 1824,yields few clues about the work’s gestation. It is a relatively clean manuscript, with few correctionsthat might betray details of the evolution of the work. Instead, we must rely on some other evidence to reconstruct the historical context in which the composition came to life. In particular,the scoring of the work, for one violin, two violas, cello, contrabass, and piano, may provide someinsight. Mendelssohn has tipped the balance of the string ensemble toward the darker, lower registers of the violas, cello, and contrabass, a disposition that reinforces the bass line, and allowsthe piano to dominate through much of the composition, so that the Sextet resembles sometimesnot so much a piece of chamber music as a piano concerto with string accompaniment.Mendelssohn’s scoring is somewhat reminiscent of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Septet in D minor,

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Op. 74, for flute, oboe, horn, viola, violoncello,double bass and piano. What is more, when thisunusual work appeared in 1816, it was alsoissued in a quintet version for violin, viola, cello,double bass, and piano, a scoring considerablycloser to that of the Sextet.

A child prodigy himself and former pupilof Mozart, Hummel (1778-1837) had settled in 1819 in Weimar, where he served asKapellmeister to the ducal court. One of theleading piano virtuosi and pedagogues of thetime (his textbook, the Ausführlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel, 1825, ran to several editions and was widelytranslated), Hummel possessed a brilliant, pearlystyle of pianism reminiscent of Mozart, and yetwas capable of producing powerfully dramaticpiano works comparable to those of his contem-porary Beethoven (in the 1830s Hummel’simposing Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor wouldtest the technical abilities of the aspiring pianist

Robert Schumann). In 1821 Hummel’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 85 had served as themodel for an early concerto by Mendelssohn in the same key; what is more, that year Mendelssohnhad at least two opportunities to meet Hummel, first in Berlin, where Hummel attended a privateperformance of the twelve-year-old’s opera Die Soldatenliebschaft, and then in Weimar, where theboy had some finishing lessons with Hummel and met the poet Goethe. Not surprisingly,Hummel’s limpid, graceful style impressed itself upon the Sextet, as in the piano figuration of thefirst movement, which not infrequently features triplet scale-like patterns and arpeggiations in theupper register of the instrument. Also Hummelesque (and recalling Mozart) is the use of

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classically balanced phrases, as in the openings of the first two movements, in which eight-bar periods of the string quintet are answered by the piano. One other connection to Hummel is evident in the third-movement minuet, with its off-beat bass notes and agitated quality, whichbrings to mind more the character of a scherzo than a minuet, and in fact may be indebted to thedemonic second movement of Hummel’s Septet, also in D minor, and marked, ambivalently,“Menuetto o Scherzo.”

If the conservatism of Mendelssohn’s composition teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, had predis-posed the prodigy toward eighteenth-century models of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, by 1824 he wasalso assimilating into his forming style more contemporary influences, of which Hummel was one.Another, ultimately more decisive influence was Beethoven. Zelter had professed to Goethe anadmiration for Beethoven’s middle-period works, including the Egmont Overture and Wellington’sVictory; nevertheless, like many of his contemporaries, Zelter was unable to fathom the abstractbeauties of the late-period works. Mendelssohn’s assessment of Beethoven seems to have begun inearnest in 1823 and 1824, when signs of Beethoven’s dramatic middle-period works began exertingtheir influence on the impressionable youth. For instance, Mendelssohn’s Symphony in C minor,Op. 11, composed just before the Sextet, is indebted on several counts to Beethoven’s FifthSymphony (1808), also in C minor. As it happens, Op. 11 betrays a thematic link to the Sextet,for the principal theme of the slow movement (Adagio), in a luminous F-sharp major with mutedstrings, is suspiciously similar to that of the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s symphony. Now thesubdued second theme of the Adagio, in which the pianist unfolds some chords against a repeatedpedal point in the violas, may well have been inspired by a similar passage in the slow movementof Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D minor, Op. 31 No. 2 (Tempest). Be that as it may, the finale of the Sextet reveals one incontrovertible borrowing from Beethoven through its use of a characteristically Beethovenian device—the dramatic interruption. Thus, well into the recapitula-tion of the sonata-form movement, Mendelssohn amasses a prolonged series of harmonies on thedominant, eventually reaching the dynamic level of triple forte (a level Beethoven had tested in hisEighth Symphony) before the rushing music spills over into a recall of the D-minor minuet, nowpressed into service to form the coda of the work. Mendelssohn would have examined a similardevice in the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the course of which is unexpectedly interrupted

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to permit a recall of the third movement. (It should be noted that Mendelssohn remained fond ofthe technique, and would reuse it in 1825 in the finale of his Octet.) Thus, the young Mendelssohnrevealed himself a serious student not only of Hummel, but also of Beethoven, two sources of thestylistic mix that would yield Mendelssohn’s mature style.

Now, in 2009, on the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, the recordings of the AtlantisEnsemble on historical instruments invite us to recapture a strong sense of how Mendelssohn conceived these youthful chamber works, and to enter into the remarkably precocious world of acomposer whom Goethe and Heine likened to a “second Mozart”—a young composer on thethreshold of making his own indelible mark in music history.

Felix Mendelssohn: Sonatas for violin (op.4), viola, clarinet and fortepiano

During the student period of the Piano Sextet, Mendelssohn also wrote a series of three duosonatas with piano accompaniment, for violin (1823), clarinet (1824), and viola (1824). Of

these, he published only the first as the Violin Sonata in F minor, Op. 4, though he did recyclematerial from the minuet of the Viola Sonata in C minor into the third movement of his SymphonyNo. 1 in C minor, Op. 11. On the other hand, the Clarinet Sonata in E-flat major remained inmanuscript and was virtually unknown until its publication in the twentieth century; it is oneexample of the composer’s caution from releasing his student works to the world (indeed, he onceconfided to Robert Schumann that he saw through the press only about one fifth of the music he produced).

In three movements, the Violin Sonata begins with an unaccompanied recitative-like cadenzafor the violin. Its turning figures, wide leaps and unpredictable arabesques lend the music an element of fantasy, and tie the sonata to the tradition of the instrumental fantasia, so that the workat times impresses as a blend of the two genres. Cast in a dissonant style, with a series of unresolveddiminished-seventh harmonies, the recitative has the effect of searching for the principal theme,frustrated after several measures when the violin reaches a non-conclusive half cadence. After a restthe piano then launches into the first theme of a sonata-form movement, and incorporates into itsigh-like, appoggiatura figures from the introductory recitative.

The juxtaposition of an Adagio instrumental recitative and Allegro moderato exposition revealsMendelssohn to have been a keen student of Beethoven, and suggests an actual model, the opening of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D minor, Op. 31 No. 2, better known as the Tempest,which begins with a fantasy-like recitative and employs a first theme dominated by descending,sigh-like figures. While Beethoven’s opening recitative uses rolled pianissimo chords and blurredopen pedal passages to achieve its magical effect, Mendelssohn relies here on the solitary violin line,intended to symbolize the persona of Eduard Rietz (1802-1832), his violin teacher and friend, for whom he wrote the sonata. The composer dedicated several other works as well to Rietz,including an early Violin Concerto in D minor, the celebrated Octet—written for Rietz’s birthdayin 1826—and the String Quintet in A major, Op. 18, to which Mendelssohn added a Nachruf inRietz’s memory upon his early death in 1832.

Much of the first movement unfolds in a more or less standard sonata form, though there arethe occasional idiosyncrasies—early in the exposition, for example, Mendelssohn departs from thetonic F minor to explore momentarily the Neapolitan G-flat major, a harmonic departure that hemay have observed in Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. And the movement ends not dramatically,but with a pianissimo smorzando, as the violin fleetingly revives the turn figure of the opening recitative, to round out the whole.

An early reviewer of Op. 4 averred that Haydn could have written the slow movement (PocoAdagio). Indeed, the opening section offers a classically proportioned theme in A-flat major in the piano immediately balanced by a repetition in the violin. But then a brief piano cadenza—another reference to the improvisational, fantasy-like opening of the first movement—introduces a contrasting section impelled by triplets, and Mendelssohn now begins to explore romantic enharmonic relationships between flat and sharp keys that betray again a stylistic affinity toBeethoven’s middle period. Even more overtly Beethovenian is the finale (Allegro agitato in 6/8time), which occasionally suggests more a Beethovenian scherzo than a finale in sonata form.Toward the end the music is unexpectedly checked by a return to the Adagio solo violin recitativefrom the first movement, which here introduces a dramatic coda. One surprise begets another:after a page of fortissimo chords the sonata ends quietly, with two pianissimo sighs in the violin, afinal reminder that all of the material derives from the initial recitative.

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Mendelssohn seems to have conceived the Viola Sonata in C minor as a pendant to Op. 4.Whether the work was also intended for Rietz is unknown, though it is possible that the composerhimself may have played the viola part, perhaps accompanied by his sister Fanny, who the same year(1824) produced a Piano Sonata in C minor that is stylistically akin. (Mendelssohn was knownfrom time to time for taking up a viola part in his Octet.) Like the Violin Sonata, the Viola Sonata begins with an Adagio slow introduction, though in this case the harmonic direction of theopening is unambiguous: after clearly announcing the tonic C minor, it eventually comes to a halfcadence on the dominant where it pauses. The main body of the movement, in a standard sonata form, exhibits effective display of the darker colors of the viola. Especially telling is the re-transition leading up to the recapitulation, with pianissimo arpeggiations in the piano againstsubdued double stops in the viola. Like Op. 4, the movement ends quietly.

Quite in contrast is the Minuet, marked Allegro molto, and presumably meant to be performedat breakneck speed, so that the movement suggests a macabre, Beethovenian scherzo, with few ifany residual ties to the dignified eighteenth-century court dance. Its principal theme begins in themiddle of the bar with a characteristic off-beat, half-step figure. In the slower Trio in the parallelC major, Mendelssohn first inserts a four-bar bridge to break the unbridled pace of the minuet. Wethen hear a simple piano melody in a homophonic, chordal texture, almost as if the composer hadin mind an imaginary chorale. (Just a few years before, when he began to study composition withCarl Friedrich Zelter, the eleven-year-old had completed dozens of chorale harmonizations, someof which were based on standard Lutheran chorales while others used hymn melodies ofMendelssohn’s own invention.) The Trio then yields to a transition that reintroduces the step figure of the minuet. Here Mendelssohn is content to reiterate the half step seventeen times before allowing the minuet proper to resume its madcap course. When, in 1824, he reused the minuet theme in the third movement of his Symphony No. 1 in C minor, he made some significant revisions, including substituting a completely new trio and altering the meter of theminuet to an uncharacteristic 6/4 time. But he kept the title Minuetto, as if he could not quite severthe movement’s final connection to the musical past.

By far the weightiest of the three movements is the finale (Andante con Variazioni), a themewith eight variations and coda. The earnest theme, exchanged between the piano and viola,

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foreshadows that of the Variations sérieuses in D minor, for piano, Op. 54, a substantial variationset that Mendelssohn contributed in 1842 to support funding the Beethoven monument in Bonn.As in the Variations sérieuses, the theme for the finale of the Viola Sonata begins with an upbeat figure leading to a suspension, and then a leap to a higher register. Mendelssohn may have associated the serious style of the music with Beethoven, and indeed may have turned toBeethoven’s monumental 32 Variations for piano in C minor for inspiration. (In this regard, it isperhaps not coincidental that the bass line of the preceding Minuetto resembles closely that ofBeethoven’s theme for the 32 Variations.)

Employing a classical binary form, Mendelssohn’s theme divides into two nearly equal portionsof eight and ten bars, each of which is repeated. Through most of the variations, he respects theintegrity of the theme, and maintains its familiar profiles and symmetrical binary division. Butalready with the second and third variations, he begins to omit repeating the second section, andin the fifth and sixth variations, curtails the repetitions of the theme altogether. In addition,Mendelssohn now departs more and more from the theme. In the sixth variation, for instance, itsopening gesture is broken up and distributed between the piano and viola, and then subsumed and lost in streaming virtuoso figurations in the piano. The seventh variation, in dotted-note style,is considerably expanded, so that it serves not so much as a variation on the theme as a stately introduction to the eighth, culminating variation. It begins in a restrained Adagio tempo as a free variation in C major for piano solo, with occasional comments from the viola. The sweeping figurations and ascents to the high register occasionally bring to mind another variation movement,the finale of Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Op. 111 in the same key, but eventually this reverie isinterrupted by a free recitative for the viola that redirects the course of the music to C minor, andan impetuous coda (Allegro molto). Mendelssohn, it seems, was impressed with the concludingAllegro, for he reused some of its stormy passagework in the Capriccio brillant, Op. 22, for pianoand orchestra, of 1832.

Considerable mystery surrounds Mendelssohn’s sole sonata for a wind instrument, the ClarinetSonata in E-flat major. For many years the work was known only through a manuscript copy notin the composer’s hand. The reemergence of the autograph, now preserved in The PierpontMorgan Library in New York, suggests that the composition was dedicated to the Baron Karl von

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Kaskel, a Dresden banker and art patron, and possibly an amateur clarinetist. But the style of thesonata and its light, effervescent figurations points to the music of Carl Maria von Weber, whowrote a substantial amount of clarinet music, including two concerti for the noted virtuosoHeinrich Bärmann, later a close friend of Mendelssohn. If the outer movements impress as fairlyroutine examples of sonata form, the middle movement invokes folksong in a haunting melody thatunfolds in three strophes separated by brief piano cadenzas. The music comes close to Osmin’s rustic Lied “Wer ein Liebchen hat gefunden” from Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail, but its lilting rhythms and meter also conjure up an example of a siciliano, a folk dance not infrequentlyvisited by Weber in a variety of works.

—R. Larry Todd

(R. Larry Todd, Arts & Sciences Professor of Music at Duke University, is the author ofMendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford University Press), named Best Biography of 2003 by theAssociation of American Publishers, and now available in German translation as Felix MendelssohnBartholdy: Sein Leben, seine Werke (Reclam Verlag). His new biography of Mendelssohn’s sister,Fanny Hensel, the Other Mendelssohn, will be released later this year.)

Conrad Graf ’s Grand Piano, Opus 2148

The foremost piano builder in Vienna in the early 19TH century was Conrad Graf. Aperfectionist and master craftsman, Graf was at once a successful businessman, a patron of the

arts, a collector of contemporary paintings, and certainly one of the most intriguing figures ofBiedermeier Vienna. His reputation as the finest among many excellent instrument makers inVienna is substantiated in contemporary sources. In 1836 Gustav Schilling wrote in the Universal-Lexicon der Tonkunst: “Graf ’s instruments are not only the most sought after on the continent, butare also shipped overseas and are heard, moreover, in other hemispheres. His instruments haveearned a reputation for their noteworthy solidity and stability of tuning, along with their sonorousand powerful tone.”

Many of Graf ’s instruments have survived to the present day, owing to their unique, extraor-dinarily stable design. Although they lack even a partial metal frame, an interior construction oflaminated, interlocking oak braces has enabled them to withstand more than a century of stringtension without twisting or buckling. The grand piano, Opus 2148, was found in Sweden byEdward Swenson of Trumansburg, NY, who, with the help of his colleague Robert Murphy, spenttwo years restoring it. The beauty of the cabinet work and the extensive gilded brass decoration suggest that the instrument may have been made for a noble family. Although unplayable at the time of its discovery, the instrument still had most of its original strings, tuning pins, leatherhammers, and dampers.

The piano is triple-strung (three strings per hammer) throughout most of its six-and-a-half-octave range. The case design and label suggest that the piano was built around 1835, toward the end of Graf ’s middle period of work, just before he won the gold medal in the first Austrianindustrial products exhibition. (From December of 1835 on, the soundboards of his instrumentsbore printed and signed labels celebrating this triumph.) Most of Graf ’s pianos of this period,Opus 2148 included, were equipped with four pedals: one to raise the dampers, one to shift the keyboard so that the hammers struck only one or two, rather than all three strings, and two“moderator” pedals, which placed a single or double strip of felt between the hammers and strings,creating a soft and unusual timbre.

—Edward E. Swenson (Trumansburg, NY)

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Penelope Crawford – fortepiano

Internationally acclaimed as one of America’s master performers onhistorical keyboard instruments, Penelope Crawford has appeared

as soloist with modern and period instrument orchestras, and asrecitalist and chamber musician throughout North America. From1975 to 1990 she was harpsichordist and fortepianist with the ArsMusica Baroque Orchestra, one of the first period instrument ensemblesin North America.

Ms. Crawford teaches a doctoral seminar in piano performancepractices of the 18TH and 19TH centuries at the University of Michigan. She also taught for twenty-five years on the artist faculty of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute. In an effort to establish stronger connections between performance and scholarship, she has served as artisticplanner and performing participant in several important international festivals and scholarly conferences: Händel’s Messiah: History & Performance (1980, Michigan); Michigan MozartFest,(1989, Michigan); Schubert’s Piano Music, (1995, Washington D. C.); and Beyond Notation: ThePerformance and Pedagogy of Improvisation in Mozart’s Music, (2002, Michigan).

In addition to her work with the Atlantis Trio she has recorded for Musica Omnia Schubert’sDie Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise with Dutch baritone, Max van Egmond. Her other recordingsof solo and chamber music have appeared on the Loft, Wild Boar, and Titanic labels.

Jaap Schröder – violin

Jaap Schröder, distinguished Dutch violinist and musical pedagogue,has enjoyed a multi-faceted career: quartet player, baroque violinist,

soloist, conductor and teacher. He has long been engaged in researchinto violin literature of the 17TH and 18TH centuries and was one of theinternational pioneers in the founding of ensembles to perform inhistorically appropriate playing styles, notably with QuadroAmsterdam and Concerto Amsterdam.

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As a soloist, Mr. Schröder has recorded repertoire ranging from works by Biber, through the J. S. Bach solo suites and sonatas, to the complete violin cycle of Beethoven for such labels asHarmonia Mundi, Virgin Classics and Smithsonian. He has directed concerts and recordings onboth sides of the Atlantic of such prestigious ensembles as the Academy of Ancient Music and theSmithsonian Chamber Orchestra.

As a chamber musician he has founded several ensembles including Quartetto Esterhazy, theSmithson & Skálholt string quartets, and the Atlantis Trio & Atlantis Ensemble. His recordingshave won many awards including a Grammy nomination. Mr. Schröder has taught on the faculties of the Yale School of Music, the Basel Schola Cantorum and the conservatories inAmsterdam, Luxemburg and Helsinki. He is frequently invited as a visiting performer-scholar toother universities and music conservatories in America and Europe.

Daniel Foster – viola

Daniel Foster has taught violin at Eastern Michigan Universitysince 1987. A student of Paul Rolland at the University of Illinois

and of Angel Reyes at the University of Michigan, he holds degrees inviolin performance from both schools. Since 1978, he has appearedfrequently throughout the United States as a solo and chamber artist,with repertoire ranging from the seventeenth through the twentiethcentury. As a baroque violinist and violist, he has performed and

recorded with Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra, Smithsonian Chamber Players, Oriana, and Tafelmusik. He is also a current and founding member of La Gente d’Orfeo, a quartet for violin, cornetto,

cello and early keyboards, specializing in Italian music of the early 17TH century. He currently servesas concertmaster of the Macomb Symphony, under Thomas Cook, and is a founding member of theRed Hot Lava Chamber Music Festival in Honolulu, and of the Alexander Trio, the faculty piano trioat Eastern Michigan University. His teaching includes emphasis on musical values and expression,cultivation of free physical movements, and enhancement of the mind/body connection.

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Peter Bucknell – viola

Peter Bucknell recently retired from his position as the violaprofessor at the Crane School of music (State University of New

York at Potsdam) to live in New York City. In 1992, he won the Auckland International Viola Congress

Competition and the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Award. Heworked with Donald McInnes in Los Angeles, with Rainer Moog inCologne, Germany, and with Yuri Bashmet in Siena, Italy.

Peter Bucknell has been a soloist with Apollo’s Fire, the Los AngelesBaroque Orchestra, Les Concerts du Monde, Los Angeles Musica Viva, and Melbourne’sGeminiani Chamber Orchestra (broadcasting live the Australian Premiere of Michael Colgrass’“Chaconne” for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation). He has given recitals in the UnitedStates, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia.

As a member of the award-winning Quatour Danel, Peter Bucknell has performed at WigmoreHall, Grange de Meslay, Radio France and in many other European halls, specializing in the quartetsof Shostakovich. He toured with the Stradivari Sextet, where he played the ‘Mahler Stradivarius’Another of his Quartets won the Interpretation Prize in the Osaka Competition in 1996.

Enid Sutherland – cello

Enid Sutherland, cellist, violist da gamba, and composer, earnedundergraduate and graduate degrees in cello and composition at

the University of Michigan. Her long career as a performer, teacher, and student of historical performances practices has taken her on amusical journey from the music of the Renaissance through that of theearly Romantics.

She attracts students from all over the country to her studio in Ann Arbor. In addition to her many solo performances, she has

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performed with a number of ensembles, including the Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra, the NewBaroque Trio, Musicke of Sundrie Kindes, the Oberlin Baroque Ensemble, the Ensemble for EarlyMusic of New York, Apollo’s Fire of Cleveland, Tafelmusik of Toronto, the Atlantis Trio &Ensemble, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

As a composer, Enid Sutherland has written numerous works in modern idioms for small tomedium mixed ensembles, solo pieces for various instruments, two song cycles, duos for violin and cello, two harpsichords, and harpsichord and piano, and one opera. She has received severalcommissions, and her works have been performed across the United States and in Europe. She hasalso been awarded grants for her work from the Ford Motor Company, the University of Michigan,and the American Music Center.

Anne Trout – double bass

Bassist Anne Trout is active as a chamber music performer andorchestral musician throughout North America, appearing with

prominent ensembles sized 5 to 50. In Boston she has served as aprincipal player for the Handel & Haydn Society, the Boston BachEnsemble, and Boston Baroque. Well-known as a continuo playerand sympathetic collaborator, she is often engaged to accompanyvocalists of international stature. She performs regularly with REBEL,the New York-based chamber ensemble, in its residency at TrinityChurch in lower Manhattan and its national tours. A long-time

member of the Musicians of Aston Magna, she has also performed with the Rockport ChamberMusic Festival, Cabrillo Festival, Colorado Music Festival, Montreal Bach Festival, JonathanMiller’s staged “St Matthew Passion” at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Philadelphia-based Tempestadi Mare, the Cambridge-based Sarasa Ensemble. Ms. Trout serves on the faculties of the GrotonSchool, Boston College, and Longy School in Cambridge.

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The Atlantis Trio and Atlantis Ensemble

The Atlantis Trio, comprising Jaap Schröder (violin), Penelope Crawford (fortepiano) and EnidSutherland (cello), specializes in the Classical and Romantic piano trio literature on period

instruments. The group has performed widely throughout North America, including concerts atthe Smithsonian’s and the Westfield Center’s co-sponsored festival Schubert’s Piano Music inWashington D. C., the Haydn Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Helicon series in New YorkCity, the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as numerous live broadcasts on NationalPublic Radio. For Musica Omnia the Atlantis Trio and the augmented Atlantis Ensemble areengaged in a major project documenting the great Romantic chamber repertoire for piano andstrings, including all the major works in this genre by Robert Schumann, Franz Schubert, SigismondThalberg, Clara Schumann & Fanny Mendelssohn. Since 2000, the Atlantis Trio and AtlantisEnsemble have been involved in a series of recordings of the chamber works for piano and strings byFelix Mendelssohn, in honor of the bicentennial in 2009. Violist Daniel Foster joins the AtlantisTrio for the three Piano Quartets, and for the Sextet the ensemble is augmented by Peter Bucknelland Anne Trout (double bass). The present release completes that project.

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Recording Dates:November, 2001 (Sextet),

May, 2007 (Quartets, Sonata Op. 4)Oct, 2008 (Sonatas for viola & clarinet)

Recording Locations:Chapel of Our Lady of Providence Center,

Northville, Michigan (Sextet)First Presbyterian Church, Ypsilanti, Michigan

Producer:Peter Watchorn

Co-producer & Engineer:Joel Gordon

Editing:Peter Watchorn, Joel Gordon,

Penelope Crawford

Fortepiano Preparation:Robert Murphy, Oberlin Conservatory

Booklet Design:Nathan Lambshead, Goodnews Graphics

info@goodnewsgraphics.biz

Front Cover:Credit: Moon Rising Over the Sea,

1821 (oil on canvas) by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)© Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/

The Bridgeman Art Library

Our thanks to Rev. Keith Geiselman, Pastor,First Presbyterian Church, Ypsilanti, MI

The Atlantis Trioleft: PENELOPE CRAWFORD fortepiano

center: JAAP SCHRÖDER violin

right: ENID SUTHERLAND cello

THE YOUNG FELIX MENDELSSOHNPiano Quartets, Op. 1-3Sextet, Op. 110Clarinet, Violin & Viola SonatasThe Atlantis Ensemble – Jaap Schröder

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musica omnia is the vibrant classical music label featuring historically-informed performances by internationally

acclaimed artists

www.musicaomnia.org

© & p 2009Musica Omnia

Made in the U.S.A.

All rights reserved.

Unauthorized duplication is a violation of all applicable laws

DISC 11–4 Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 1 (1824)5–8 Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 2 (1825)DISC 21–4 Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor, Op. 3 (1826)5–8 Piano Sextet in D major, Op. (posth.) 110* (1824)DISC 31–3 Sonata in F minor for violin & fortepiano, Op. 4 (1823)4–6 Sonata in E flat major for clarinet & fortepiano (1824)7–9 Sonata in C minor for viola & fortepiano*** (1824)

Total Time: 3hr 18'33

Conventional wisdom has it that Felix Mendelssohn came into his own as a composer at the age of16 in 1825, with the composition of his string Octet and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’sDream”. This release, the final volume of the Atlantis Ensemble’s Mendelssohn 2009 project, revealsthe lesser-known riches among the works written by young Felix in the years immediately preceding,1822-1824. Jaap Schröder and his colleagues take us directly into the prosperous Mendelssohnhousehold of the 1820s, a remarkable environment that nurtured young Felix, the prodigy.

THE YOUNG FELIX MENDELSSOHNPiano Quartets, Op. 1-3

Sextet, Op. 110Clarinet, Violin & Viola Sonatas

The Atlantis EnsembleJaap Schröder violin: Matteo Gofriller, Venice c.1700;

viola***, Joseph Curtin, Ann Arbor, MIPenelope Crawford fortepiano: Conrad Graf, Vienna, 1835

Daniel Foster viola: Luciano Bini, 1980Peter Bucknell* viola: anon. Tyrolean, 18th centuryEnid Sutherland cello: anon. Tyrolean, 18th century

Owen Watkins clarinet: Joel Robinson, NY, after H. GrenserAnne Trout* double bass: anon. Tyrolean, c. 1840

The Romantics 13

3 CD