Word: mendelssohn
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...MENDELSSOHN: Five Symphonies; Three Overtures. Claudio Abbado conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon; 4 LPs or CDs). Imagine the history of 19th century music if Felix Mendelssohn had been the great romantic icon instead of Beethoven. In place of egocentric storms there would be grace and lucidity; instead of anguish there would be serenity and inner peace. The masterpieces produced by such disparate composers as Brahms, Wagner and Mahler % under Beethoven's spell are justly prized, of course, but the romantics could have used a little less irascibility and more agreeability...
...Luther, in disguise, completed his translation of the New Testament while hiding out from Catholic wrath and Wagner set his opera Tannhauser. In Leipzig, a sterner Bach is memorialized outside the Thomaskirche by both a full-length statue and, not far from the church, a bust dedicated by Felix Mendelssohn. Genius pays homage to even greater genius: it was the romantic Mendelssohn, a Christianized Jew, who in 1829 revived Bach's greatest religious work, the towering St. Matthew Passion, and in so doing unwittingly canonized...
...skillfully disguised plaster. Scenes from plays like Goethe's Faust and Lessing's Nathan der Weise adorn the doorways; in the auditorium, the gilt chandelier is topped with the crest of the old Saxon monarchy. It illuminates a mid-19th century musical pantheon that includes Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Spontini...
...River, the Brooklyn Philharmonic presented the first indoor performance of Tobias Picker's frisky Keys to the City, written in 1983 to celebrate the Brooklyn Bridge's centenary. And Pittsburgh got the first hearing of Ned Rorem's rawboned An American Oratorio, performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Mendelssohn Choir...
...when Dr. William DeVries finally cut it loose, tore it out of the Mercurochrome-stained chest cavity, and put it to one side. For the next three hours, while a nearby heart-lung bypass machine kept the unconscious patient alive?and while a tape in the background eerily played Mendelssohn and Vivaldi?DeVries' sure hands carefully stitched into place a grapefruit-size gadget made of aluminum and polyurethane. At 12:50 p.m. last Monday, the Jarvik-7 artificial heart newly sewn inside William J. Schroeder began beating steadily, 70 beats to the minute. When Schroeder opened his eyes 3½ hours...