Mendelssohn: Suleika (Goethe/von Willemer) Op. 34 No. 4

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.

Mentors like Gerhard Schulz (Alban Berg Quartet) and Yuri Bashmet have already predicted that a great career lies ahead of the 30-year-old violist Nils Mönkemeyer. He is already one of his generation's leading viola players, with many competition wins to his name, including the UK’s Parkhouse Award in 2009, and the International Yuri Bashmet Competition in 2006.

For his Sony Classical début Ohne Worte (Without Words), the young musician from Bremen and his English piano partner Nicholas Rimmer have put together a recital programme that highlights the viola's 'voice-like' qualities. To this end, lieder by Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann have been arranged as songs without words for the viola. The recital is completed by Schubert's Arpeggione sonata in the version for viola and piano.

In selecting the songs to arrange, Mönkemeyer chose songs such as Schubert’s Ständchen, where the emphasis is first and foremost on the vocal line rather than the lyrics. The same applies to the songs by Schumann, which include lieder from well-known song cycles Liederkreis and Dichterliebe.

By way of contrast, the remaining works heard here by Mendelssohn and Schubert are arrangements of original instrumental pieces. Mendelssohn composed his Songs Without Words for the piano, while Franz Schubert originally wrote his Arpeggione sonata of 1823 for the six-stringed instrument of the same name. "There are fewer acrobatics involved on the viola", says Mönkemeyer; "the melodies flow more naturally and major leaps are avoided. That makes it all the more clear that the underlying idea that inspired this sonata is that of a song."

Auf Flügeln des Gesangs (On Wings of Song) is far and away the most popular of Mendelssohn's songs. Heard on this CD with selection of his earlier lieder this is another fine release from Carus. The tenor Hans Jörg Mammel, who enjoys an international reputation for his Lieder singing, offers with this selection, impressive insights into Mendelssohn’s Lieder. He is accompanied by Arthur Schoonderwoerd on a historic pianoforte.

During his tragically short life, Felix Mendelssohn produced an extensive output of music covering every genre. Although he claimed that he took little pleasure in writing for the piano and felt that it was not an area of composition that he was particularly good at, the music itself has always retained a place in the affection of performers. After the sonatas of his early youth, he concentrated mostly on producing short pieces which could more readily be put together during the limited gaps in his busy professional life. The anthology selected for this recording by Bertrand Chamayou interweaves many of these shorter works with more substantial pieces, and includes some rarely performed music alongside established masterpieces like the “Songs without words