Mendelssohn: Und über dich wohl streut der Wind

Until Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday in 2009, over a third of his songs were hardly known at all. When Breitkopf & Härtel published the last volume of the Mendelssohn Complete Edition, the public gained access to songs not even published during Mendelssohn’s lifetime. When you hear these treasures, you’ll be amazed that it took so long for these works to be unearthed.

Eugene Asti’s pioneering Mendelsson Songs and Duets series, containing a large amount of first recordings and rarities, concludes with this fifth volume, a generous two CDs for the price of one. The contents range from Mendelssohn’s first extant composition of any kind – a birthday song presented to his father by the precocious ten-year-old composer – to settings of the German romantic poets Schiller, Goethe and Eichendorff,which place Mendelssohn firmly in the canon of the great Lieder composers.

These works are performed by a talented group of young singers who will be familiar from other discs in the series, including the winner of the 2008 Kathleen Ferrier prize, Katherine Broderick.