Mendelssohn: Complete Chamber Music for Strings (II)

Album review

The sunny Felix Mendelssohn of general concert programming is indeed occasionally in evidence on this release by Germany's Mandelring Quartet, for instance in the Canzonetta second movement of the String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 12, which could have come out of the Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night's Dream. But elsewhere the album offers a very different Mendelssohn: the genius young composer who "got" Beethoven at a time when very few people really did (the booklet includes a great contemporary evaluation of the "Kreutzer" sonata as "terroristic"). And it was not just Beethoven, but the thorny late quartets of Beethoven, that Mendelssohn grappled with. The String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, clearly shows the influence of both Beethoven's String Quartet in F major, Op. 135, and String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132; its final movement mixes elements of those two finales, while the opening movement quotes the rhythm of a line in a Mendelssohn song, giving it a motivic treatment in the manner of the opening movement of Op. 135. The slightly later String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 12, seems drawn from the Op. 132 finale, and throughout there is an attempt to replicate the odd mixture of profound artifice and low humor characteristic of late Beethoven. This was impressive for the teenage Mendelssohn, and the inclusion at the end of a student work, the String Quartet in E flat major, WoO, of 1823, fills out the picture with its mightily ambitious concluding double fugue. These works have never been terribly popular, even in Mendelssohn's second home of England, probably because they do not feed the listener's desire for lightly lyrical and hummable tunes. But they are well worth getting to know, and the Mandelring Quartet does them justice here with serious readings and fine engineering from Germany's Audite label.
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