Mendelssohn: Rondo brillant in E flat major, Op. 29

All Helmchen’s recordings for the PentaTone label have been award winners. The romantic and virtuoso piano concertos by Mendelssohn never became as popular as his violin concertos but are of just as high a calibre. Helmchen regularly works with Philippe Herreweghe and this collaboration has resulted in a very special album. There is no other recording of these works currently available on SACD.

BIS presents a boxed set of Felix Mendelssohn’s complete symphonies, string symphonies and concertos.

The symphonies were recorded in 2007 and 2008 by Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and were warmly received by the reviewers when they were first released.

The 12 string symphonies give us the background to the symphonies for full orchestra, written by a boy not yet fifteen. The recordings are from the Amsterdam Sinfonietta conducted by Lev Markiz.

A further four discs offer all of the eight concertos that Mendelssohn composed. These include the youthful works with string orchestra accompaniment (concertos for violin, piano, violin and piano, and for two pianos), as well as the mature works for violin, piano and full orchestra, performed here by Isabelle van Keulen and Ronald Brautigam.

John Ogdon was born on 27th January, 1937 in Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire and died on 1st August, 1989 in London. His first serious study of the piano was at the Royal Manchester College of Music where his contemporaries were Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies; he also studied composition with Richard Hall, all of whom have music recorded in this collection. His prowess was noticed when he replaced an indisposed soloist in Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto in Liverpool and played almost at sight. At the age of 21 he made his London debut at the Proms in 1958 with Busoni’s Concerto (which he recorded in 1967).

In 1961 he was awarded the Liszt Prize in Budapest and the following year shared the coveted first prize at the Moscow Tchaikovsky competition with Vladimir Ashkenazy; this achievement launched his international career. His recordings from this time not only attest to his remarkable virtuosity and intense musicianship but also his determination to explore both rarer and modern repertoire and give them the performances that show them to their best advantage.

This collection therefore contains not merely the classics – concertos by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Schumann and Grieg and solos by Liszt and Chopin – but rarer concertos by Mendelssohn, Glazunov Bartók as well as the aforementioned Busoni. The major contribution to the catalogue of recorded music must be the solo piano works by the 20th century composers: Sir Michael Tippett, Alan Rawsthorne, Alun Hoddinott, Christopher Headington, David Blake, Robert Sherlaw Johnson and his teacher and colleagues from his days in Mancheser: Richard Hall and the previously mentioned Goehr, Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies as well as works by himself. One further work requires especial mention: Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia on DSCH, the composer’s tribute to Dmitri Shostakovich.

At over 85 minutes duration it has to be split across two CDs and the work together with Ogdon’s support of it yielded the highest praise.