Mendelssohn: Song without Words, Op. 19b No. 1 in E major 'Sweet Remembrance' (Andante con moto)

Howard Shelley is acclaimed as the living master of early Romantic piano music. So much of this music was ignored throughout the twentieth century that there is still a sense of discovery at each new recording. Shelley here presents the first instalment of a six-volume set of Mendelssohn’s complete solo piano music—perhaps the least well-known part of the composer’s repertoire.

Mendelssohn composed or began nearly two hundred works for piano. Nevertheless, he saw only about seventy through the press, released in seventeen opera from the Capriccio Op 5 (1825) to the sixth volume of the Lieder ohne Worte Op 67 (1845). Some twenty-five additional pieces appeared posthumously in eleven additional opera. The remainder, whether fully drafted or fragmentary, were left to his musical estate or have disappeared.

Volume 1 includes Opp 5, 6, and 7, the first three piano compositions Mendelssohn published between 1825 and 1827, as well as Op 19b, the first volume of his Lieder ohne Worte, released in 1832.

Martin Stadtfeld performs Mendelssohn, Schumann & Bach, with the renowned Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, under its founder, Sir Neville Marriner. This is the first Mendelssohn (1809-1847) disc from acclaimed, award winning German pianist Stadtfeld, who caused a stir in 2002, becoming the first German to win the 'International Bach Competition' in Leipzig. There are two CD's, with disc one being a x13 piece body of Mendelssohns work & then a bonus disc two containing x4 pieces of work, covering Schumann & Bach.

Ronald Brautigam here performs the first four books of Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (Lieder ohne Worte).

If claims could be made for a composer to have invented a genre single-handedly, Mendelssohn would be a strong candidate with his ‘Songs Without Words’ - short lyrical pieces for the piano using a song-like structure. They were immediately popular across Europe, and were imitated by several composers, including Robert Schumann.

One of today’s leading fortepiano players, Ronald Brautigam has released complete sets of piano music by Mozart and Haydn, and is currently recording a highly regarded series of the solo piano works by Beethoven.

The debut album from South Korean pianist Jingsang Lee features little heard music - the Piano Sonata No 1 and Three Caprices - by Ferdinand Hiller (1811- 1885) alongside popular repertoire by Mendelssohn and Chopin. What makes this double CD especially unusual and attractive is that it pairs a studio recording of the programme performed on a modern Steinway grand piano with a live recital recording of all the same pieces played on three period Steinway pianos dating broadly from the years when the composers were active.

Jinsang Lee first performed this recital under the title ‘Music Making Among Friends’, an imaginary soirée involving three Romantic composers who had become very good friends.

The recording makes no pretence at historical authenticity - there’s no record of what the three young men may have played at their meetings in Paris and in Germany, and Hiller’s First Sonata was published in 1852, after the deaths of both Chopin and Mendelssohn - but it ponders on each composer performing their own music for each other’s enjoyment.

Born in 1981 in Seoul, Jingsang Lee was the first prize winner of the Hong Kong International Piano Competition in 2008, a triennial event organized by the Chopin Society of Hong Kong. Lee found Hiller’s music in the library of the Hochschule für Musik Köln where he was studying - the composer founded that august institution in 1850. Hiller’s compositions may be rarely performed nowadays but they are robust, musical and a delight to listen to.

Over four days of sessions in Hollywood during 1946 and 1947, Jascha Heifetz and his regular accompanist Emanuel Bay recorded this evocative series of encores. The repertoire was wide-ranging, and included three Spanish pieces by Sarasate, Nin and Ernesto Halffter, all delectably played, in his only recordings of them. He turned also to his own transcription of Bax’s Mediterranean as well as to staples such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s dazzling Flight of The Bumble-Bee. Throughout, Heifetz’s bowing, pizzicati, double stops, glissandi and inimitable portamenti grace these pieces with incredible freshness.

Mark Obert-Thorn, reissue producer and audio restoration engineer