Word: mendelssohn
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Beethoven and Schubert and the last great classical composers and the first greats of the Romantic era. The Romantics include Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Moussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, many of whom were inspired more by small forms like songs or preludes than by symphonies and concertos, which pair a solo instrument and an orchestra. The classical and Romantic repertoire forms the backbone of the music played most often in concert halls...
...intermission, after the Society had already performed a piece by Felix Mendelssohn and Claude Debussy, one the group's social chairmen Gregory Dohi stepped forward to announce that the Red Sox were beating the Mets. But before Dohi could say what the score was in the sixth game of the championship series, the crowd in Sanders Theater broke into a mixture of cheers and hisses. When they eventually calmed down the orchestra appropriately performed a work by American composer Aaron Copland...
With his son conducting, Stern will play Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. The younger Stern, a music major at Yale University, also will conduct Brahms' German Requiem, and his father will play in the violin section of the orchestra...
This is not to say that Mendelssohn's music is merely happy talk. One of the greatest prodigies in musical history, young Felix wrote 13 symphonies for string orchestra before the age of 15 and produced a full-blown work of genius at age 17 in the dazzling, quicksilver Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the most successful purely instrumental interpretation of Shakespeare ever written. Yet Mendelssohn had the emotional range to evoke the craggy, forbidding atmosphere of the Hebrides in his "Fingal's Cave" Overture, summon up the combative spirit of the Scottish highlands in his Third Symphony...
Abbado and the London Symphony more than do justice to this underrated composer (Mendelssohn's reputation has still to recover fully from the damage the Nazis did to it), offering crisp, incisive performances. The "Italian" Symphony explodes in a burst of melody, its irresistible opening theme a shout of joy, its finale a whirling saltarello. But Abbado is just as persuasive in the Symphony No. 2, a religious choral work subtitled Hymn of Praise. Although structurally similar to Beethoven's Ninth, Mendelssohn's symphony is its emotional antithesis: calm where Beethoven is uneasy, confident where Beethoven is questioning, sacred where...