Mendelssohn : Violin Concerto in E Minor

Violin Concerto in E Minor

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Finale: Allegro molto vivace

Felix Mendelssohn, in his day known world-wide as perhaps the most celebrated composer of them all, composed this work not long before his early death, creating perhaps the best-loved of all violin concertos. A test of any professional performer, the concerto is typical of Mendelssohn’s style, with a wonderful balance between brilliant display, rhythmic energy and melting melodic lyricism. The Finale is particularly a challenge for the violinist, who from the first note tears off on a musical steeplechase which never flags, racing on to an exciting finish.

for a concert by Darwyn Apple

Mendelssohn Excerpts from Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Excerpts from Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Ever since the era of Goethe the Germans have claimed Shakespeare as one of their own. The celebrated Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare’s plays appeared during Felix Mendelssohn’s childhood---Friedrich Schlegel was his uncle. As youngsters the composer and his sister Fanny read Shakespeare with great relish (in both English and German), and especially loved A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thus it was only natural that Mendelssohn would express his love of the play in the wonderful overture composed in the summer of 1826, when the composer was barely 17 years of age.

In 1843 Mendelssohn was asked to supply incidental music for a staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Berlin, where he had taken charge of music in the imperial capital at the invitation of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. The result was a sequence of twelve pieces heard during the course of the play, many of them hearkening back to the “fairy music” which was such a memorable element of the overture written seventeen years earlier.

Three of the best-known excerpts from the complete incidental music will be performed this evening: the Intermezzo, Nocturne and Scherzo. The Intermezzo is a brief, agitated musical interlude which depicts the anxiety and confusion experienced by the lovers during their night wandering in the forest, falling prey to the mischievous actions of Puck and Oberon. A more extended piece to be performance between acts (and scenery changes), the Nocturne is a warm evocation of the romantic feelings of the lovers, especially memorable for the tender expressiveness of the horns. The Scherzo is another entr’acte, one perfectly portraying the supernatural world of Titania, Oberon, Puck and their cohort of fairies, filled with flitting, gossamer passages for the winds, buoyed up by a buzzing rhythmic energy.

NCO Concert